Pros
- Great work/life balance and benefits: the PTO policy is FAANG-level good and the flexibility we've had during the pandemic has been nearly seamless. The insurance plan is life-changing; it's clear that management wants only the best for it's employees.
- Super friendly work environment, every employee I've met made me feel welcome when I first started and has always made time to help out when I needed it, from co-workers to C-Level management
- Compensation was above what I asked, and I was given a clear career growth trajectory early on
- Lots of industry talent, I can't speak too much about the business side although the meetings are very transparent and honest about the state and the (upward) direction of the company; it's clear the leadership cares about employees as people and not just resources. The threat analysis team is made of some world-class talent, and I'm always impressed when I hear about the new developments from the CTO's weekly updates. It's true that much of the engineering effort is contracted out to a company with a strong history with the company, but having worked here for 6 months on an integrated team, you'd hardly notice except for the timezone difference: everyone is so clearly on the same team.
I previously worked for an app-shop that partnered with a non-US contract company and it was appalling to see the disparity in how the employees were treated, and how they treated each other. Here though, Clean.io and Sigma employees feel like one and the same, and (provided I'm not messaging someone at midnight their time) I've never had any issue working with any of my employees. I hope I can be as helpful as everyone has been to me.
- You work for a startup that actually does something. We protect website owners and their visitors from people who just want to make the internet worse, which is cool.
I don't feel like a drone who's only goal is to ship marginal features to another app that could have been a website.
- Great leadership: in my second interview I met the CTO and I was immediately struck by the talent I would be working with (albeit down a few rungs). Alexey is a brilliant, thorough, and incredibly hard-working CTO and I feel confident in the decisions he makes leading the technical teams. The former CEO Matt Gillis and the current CEO and founder Geoff Stupay both have incredible pedigrees of success and great heads for business and leadership. I've worked close to C-Level managers before but this is the first company where they actually believe the things they say, work to improve the workplace, and they actively lead by example rather than hand down old-school business management techniques.
In working here I've been routinely impressed at how transformative a good work environment has been for me (especially in 2020-2021) and I'm looking forward to where we go next.
- Plenty of things that people like about startups (agile development, working on different projects week to week, getting to work with lots of different technologies across different environments) without much of the toxic aspects that often come with them (no navel-gazing evangelism, unhealthy working hours, or elitist tech leads here!).
Cons
Diversity is pretty low, but it is improving.
