Worst experience of my career - Senior Software Engineer Vanta Employee Review

1.0
27 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay is decent I guess although badly unbalanced between regions

Cons

Bullying and targeting against individual employees is common. The company completely fails to protect employees from malicious managers or do any kind of due diligence. Employees are completely at the mercy of managers. In order to advance their own careers, managers PIP and fire employees to make themselves look decisive and like they were actively managing their employees well. Engineering leadership is full of sharks and if you are naive or if you'd just rather keep your head down and do good work you will be easy prey. The culture is bad. The tech stack is completely wrong. It is among the most immature engineering cultures I’ve experienced in my career. A huge chunk of the developers at the company are completely incapable of solving novel problems independently and can only follow established patterns, many of which are bad. Engineering isn’t represented in the C suite at all, the head of engineering reports to the Chief Product Officer. Consequently the company is a feature factory with no engineering vision at the top level. Experienced engineers have been leaving the company in droves lately. The culture feels incredibly corporate and stultifying for the size and age of the company. They are obsessed with process and procedure and leadership micromanages many aspects of day to day team execution like which meetings/ceremonies we have to have and how we plan our work and use JIRA. Almost all the code is in a single application, which is not continuously deployed but is only deployed every hour. Staging releases get manually QAed by a third party company and only released to prod if they pass. So it’s not uncommon for most of the day’s prod deploys to be skipped because the staging deploy isn’t passing QA and the team that owns the bug isn’t being very responsive. And then a huge prod deploy of 300 changes goes out representing the last 24 hours of work. And testing coverage is lacklustre so the odds of that deploy having a production issue are high. There are multiple incidents, rollbacks, and hotfixes most days. There isn’t a clear explicit plan for breaking up the single application into multiple applications, which is the only solution to the problem. There has been a failure to follow any sort of typescript best practices, both due to lack of care and lack of anyone with advanced typescript knowledge at the company until recently. The types are a Lovecraftian monstrosity and it takes 20+ minutes to typecheck the whole application. This is a major reason CI and the merge queue are always backed up. There is headcount allocated to fixing this problem but it’s simply not enough. All the C suite cares about is features, so Engineering Initiatives get short shrift. The CI and deploy pipelines are not scaling. Something breaks nearly every day causing CI and deploys to freeze for hours. The merge queue time hits 2+ hours nearly every day. They are planning to grow from 300 to 500 engineers this year and I can’t imagine how bad it’s going to be. They are not investing nearly enough into DX to support the scale. If you work here, look forward to a multi-day development cycle at all times.

Explore other reviews about Vanta

5.0
15 June 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great salary, I work on a team that has excellent balance. I get recognized when I do good work.

Cons

Company has a big focus on AI, but not sure we’re all marching in the same direction and often doesn’t feel like a good use of resources.

2.0
9 June 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good pay and benefits, decent work life balance

Cons

This place is incredibly dysfunctional. Every day feels draining. Toxic and rude coworkers, immature leadership, incompetent and ineffective management, inefficient processes... it's nearly impossible to get anything done without multiple layers of review and endless rounds of revisions. The bureaucracy is exhausting. Decisions are made in siloes and often walked back because they weren’t thought through properly to begin with. Information is shared selectively and you will often learn of things “through the grapevine”. Priorities, goals, metrics are nowhere to be found. There's little sense of culture and very little to no focus on employee experience, DEI, or anything beyond the bottom line. Many people come across as disengaged, transactional, and self-interested. Development opportunities are limited, and career and compensation growth are slow even for strong performers. Office politics are prevalent, employee concerns are rarely acted on, and meaningful feedback is rarely given or asked for. There is an overwhelming focus on AI, often without consideration of resource usage, output quality, or security implications, which is surprising given the industry. Usage is duplicative, disconnected, and directionless. I've honestly never felt less connected to my work. At some point, I found myself emotionally checking out just to preserve my own well-being.

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