Culture at January: Working on Our Engineering Team

This summer is an exciting time for January, our NYC based team moved into a new office and our team continues to grow. This quarter, we’re thrilled to be hiring for a range of new roles on our Engineering team.

For job candidates, we know how important it is to evaluate culture when interviewing with a new company (56% of interviewees say company culture is more important than salary, according to Glassdoor!). We want to make sure that any interviewees evaluating January feel that they have the information they need about our company and our team to make the right decision for their career.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of FAQs about our Engineering team. If you’re interested in a role on January’s Engineering team and want to learn more about what it’s like to work here, read on!

What are the three engineering teams and what kinds of projects do they work on?

1. The Borrower Experience team builds products that help borrowers resolve past-due accounts and get them back on their financial feet. Our north stars are borrower satisfaction, account lifecycle, unit margins, and net recoveries. We own the systems that drive payments, settlement negotiations, communications, and more. We balance evidence, logic, and instinct, and we habitually run experiments to understand our borrowers and their complex situations.
2. The Operational Excellence team builds products to support our clients (financial institutions) with efficient and safe technology to best serve their needs and to grow the relationship. We do this by creating tailored tooling for our Operations team that deeply integrates with our application. We achieve this mostly (though not exclusively) through work on our backend, database, and distributed systems.
3. The Platform team builds products for our entire engineering organization by proactively looking for ways to remove toil, maintain a high reliability bar, and make doing the correct thing easy. You will help us identify which parts of our system to invest in *before* they break under scale, remain unsatisfied with ‘good enough’, and explore new technologies without chasing hype. Here are some of things we love: infrastructure-as-code, self-healing systems, defense-in-depth, and the command line.

What is Team Culture like?

We trust others to solve problems, not to complete checklists. Our team is made of capable individuals invested in our mission. We are inspired by discovering and implementing solutions that benefit our company, borrowers, and clients. We know that our teammates, given the right context and training, can be trusted with a wide scope of responsibility.

We celebrate the wins. It’s not easy to transform an overlooked corner of consumer finance, but we believe having fun, maintaining good humor, and celebrating the wins makes the journey that much better for us.

We give direct, actionable feedback to each other. If we aren’t open with our colleagues, they are forced to grow in a vacuum without information.

We cherish writing (and meetings that matter). Writing enables us to clarify our thoughts, communicate asynchronously, and leave a chronicle we can revisit. If it could have been an email, we want you to say so. Meetings are important, but they work best when a limited group of stakeholders is prepared, engaged, and heard.

What's the VP of Engineering like as a leader?

“Matt, our VP of Engineering, is a true empathetic leader who fosters a culture of collaboration from the top down. He invests time and effort upfront to understand each individual's aspirations, strengths, and challenges, and then strives to provide the support and guidance needed for every engineer to thrive. Under his leadership, we are guided to grow in areas that are beyond technical capabilities, such as developing a strong instinct for product development, so we can all work collectively to grow our company and business.” Linya Hu, Senior Engineer

Where are the teams located?

We are headquartered in New York and have an office in San Francisco, and the majority of our team is based in one of those two locations. That said, we also have a handful of team members working remotely from various locations across the United States.

What does growth and mentorship look like on January's Engineering team?

When it comes to growth on the engineering team, we thought there was no better person to ask than our VP of Engineering, Matt Flower. Here’s what Matt had to say:

“Your earliest steps will involve getting familiar with January and our systems. Support for junior engineers starts from their first moments with January when they are assigned someone to help guide them through their onboarding. All engineers are encouraged to ask questions and to learn from their teammates as part of their everyday jobs.

All engineers have weekly 1:1's with their engineering managers to help solve challenges and identify opportunities. As you start to settle in, your engineering managers will also run career planning sessions with you to help provide guidance on the skills required to match your career goals. If you don't already know exactly what that career goal is, we can help with that too!

Additionally, we provide a career ladder to all employees that specifically lays out the expectations for both your current job title and future job titles. When it comes to your career there should be no surprises of what's expected of you.

Finally, all employees in engineering meet with me regularly and my door is always open. If I don't know the answer myself, I'll definitely help you find it!”

Community, Growth, and Innovation

In summary, the Engineering team at January is much more than a group of talented individuals—it's a community focused on growth, innovation, and meaningful work. Our collaborative team is driven by our mission and the desire to make a significant impact in the lives of consumers. We value trust, open communication, and constructive feedback. Our leadership, led by our empathetic VP of Engineering, prioritizes individual career aspirations and development, supporting each team member’s unique career journey. Whether you're situated in our New York or San Francisco office, or working remotely, you'll find an environment that encourages learning, mentorship, and personal development. If you're eager to contribute to an ambitious mission, learn from a diverse team, and grow your skills, January's Engineering team may be your next ideal destination.

Learn about our open roles, here.