Cinarra Review - Associate Product Manager Cinarra Systems Employee Review

- A very good team of smart, talented, and fun people - Strong support from lead investor SoftBank - Interesting data sets - You will have the ability to make your ideas a reality and to have an impact - Flat organizational structure, everyone is very approachable - A good place to learn and grow

- Work split between 3 offices (US, Russia, Japan) can make things challenging - The physical building that houses the US office in Santa Clara is a bit depressing

1. Very sound technical, engineering teams 2. Easy going, friendly and helpful colleagues. 3. Democratic decision making process (meetings are opt-ins, votes taken for best team meeting times etc). There are very few just-do-it AFAIK. 4. Because this is is still a young startup, you can actually make meaningful contributions in terms of engineering effort. This can include re-architecting the entire data-path pipeline to scale better, or coming up with a better algorithm for some existing functionality. 5. Very flexible and open to suggestions/improvements. People are very open and honest about what they should've ideally done, what they did not foresee and what can be accomplished within meaningful release timelines. 6. Empowering individuals. I especially liked that as a feature owner (small or large), you are expected to come up with your own timelines for tasks you set out to do. 7. LAST BUT NOT THE LEAST : A management and HR team that truly cares about its employees. In my 10 years of working in the valley, this is the only startup that organized a 401K expert to come on-site and speak with us about our retirement benefits. Plus they also had an immigration lawyer coming in to help those of us on H1-B/GC. For a start-up of this size, they really did not need to do all this. Shows that as a company (upper management, HR, everyone included) they care.

Scheduling meetings across time-zones to accommodate colleagues from other countries was a big pain-point. This is still a very early phase and I'm sure they'll find a way to ease things out.