“You could do a lot worse than starting your career here,” Rick Wager, my current manager, told me early in my application process with Ibotta. Three months into my work as an engineer on the Platform Team I know that Rick was being characteristically understated.
The story of how I entered the tech world is becoming more common. I completed an adult education program called the Turing School of Software Design after deciding that I did not see a future in the ten plus year career in public education I had built for myself. Landing an engineering position at Ibotta is a major turning point in my life and has provided me with the opportunity to engage with highly fulfilling technical work.
On my first day at Ibotta I was met with a kind of intentionality reminiscent of a dynastic sports franchise or well-designed video game. Ibotta did not just hire me and then let me wander through the ocean of complexity that is our platform. Instead I was hired with two other engineers on my team and the three of us were able to pool our collective experience and multiply our impact.
Together and with the guidance of some of our more experienced colleagues, we worked to refactor the code that turns receipt images into data that our system can then use to pay cash rewards to our customers. Since this is such a core part of the application, there was already a lot of infrastructure in place and expertise on the team that made it easy to get up and running. It also was a project that was especially rewarding because we could see the quantifiable improvements we were making to our receipt processing system. Our work was accelerated by the fact that we were doing it together; we could check each other’s code and improve quickly based on our growing collective experience.
In terms of working with more senior teammates, I was fortunate enough to get paired with Alex Furmonov, a wily twenty year veteran of software engineering originally from St. Petersburg, Russia. With Alex, I help maintain the code that manages Ibotta’s billing infrastructure, and under his tutelage I gain the benefits of his knowledge. The billing and receipt processing projects helped me learn two diverse pieces of Ibotta’s technology relatively quickly. As a new member of the team, I could not ask for more opportunities to learn and contribute both from working closely with my peers and alongside talented engineers with many years of experience at the most prestigious technology companies around.
As an engineer at Ibotta I work on challenges that are highly complex and the solutions I implement must work at the scale of millions of users. While that opportunity would be enough of a reason to feel bullish about engineering opportunities at Ibotta, there is so much more.
At Ibotta, I know that my work is valued and this makes me feel great everytime I step into our gorgeous downtown Denver office. There is a ton of public recognition in company wide stand-ups and townhalls where senior leadership celebrate team wins and eagerly shoutout names and distribute credit. For example, after less than three months, CEO, Bryan Leach, recognized me and my teammate’s work on receipt processing in front of the entire company.
Knowing that the company values my contributions goes far beyond public pats on the back. Every week my manager, Rick, makes time for a one on one meeting with me where he asks me how I am doing and what he can help with. Our check-ins always end with him telling me how great I’m doing and leave me feeling truly appreciated.
Of course there are the signs of high regard that any engineer would expect at a top tier technology company. We get bagels every Friday and plenty of snacks throughout the rest of the week. It seems like almost every week is a company happy hour or outing. There are weekly lunch and learns on new technologies and engineering best practices. I have a top of the line computer, a comfortable desk, the freedom to set up my development environment and autonomy to work on the projects I am most interested in. The tangible benefits list goes on.
Ibotta is at an exciting moment in our history. Version 5.0 of our application has just been released and it represents a tremendous leap forward for the company. The challenges we are trying to solve are not trivial and will shape the shopping and advertising worlds for years to come. Most importantly the recognition that we get as engineers is palpable and the learning never ends. In the words of Rick Wager, ‘Full speed ahead.’
