Engineering For Empathy

At Alfred, our culture is critical. It is focused on supporting an exceptional work environment where we achieve the best outcomes, and more specifically, on delivering our service promise to give you space and time. At the core of our culture are the values that help us do this: Integrity, Empathy, Transparency, Excellence, and Play. Our job is to live, breathe, and make decisions by these values. They cannot simply be put up on a wall and then ignored.

We have a huge vision. We are creating a world where our homes get things done for us, customers never have to ask more than once for the things they need, and each interaction is intentional and personal, leaving each of us more connected and with more time to do the things we enjoy. This is exciting but it isn’t easy. To achieve it, we have to continually delight our customers, earn their trust, and add value to their lives every day.

Delivering on this vision requires the right technical talent. These are people who possess supreme integrity, are transparent, take ownership, and most importantly, hold themselves and each other highly accountable. These people are able to collaborate without ego while serving as capable and creative problem solvers. An environment like this is rare, in my experience, but it creates a truly magical ecosystem when achieved.

Creating a universal “API” (or bridge between the online and offline worlds to provide what we believe will become the future of “artificial” intelligence and service provision) is an extremely complex and challenging endeavor. In our view, every successful AI system will have people play a critical part. People must return to the center of the computing loop. We are striving to be at the forefront of a big sea change when things like ‘automating away our jobs’ isn’t the goal anymore. Instead, it is to embrace the human element, to have technology work seamlessly with the way people live, and to never forget that advancing society through innovative engineering and having a heart are not mutually exclusive.

We are really paying attention to people who pay attention. We must have client outcome oriented engineers and product managers who watch, listen, and adapt and not people who are looking for predetermined technical outcomes; or even short term business outcomes for that matter.

We are looking for people who practice empathy and imagine how their decisions impact an experience: our customers, our home managers, our ops team, our service providers, our community. If something is broken, we fix it, whether it’s “our job” or not. We are all part of one team with the same goal, and every team member must genuinely feel part of it.

This is why having exceptional people in an exceptional environment is a prerequisite. We must be one of the most trusted companies in the world because today we are the only company in the world that customers trust with the keys to their home.

We are humans, and we won’t be perfect, but we will own up to our mistakes — and work to not make them again. We will speak up when something doesn’t smell right. And we must come to work every day with the same fire and passion we had on day one.

Engineering empathy is extremely difficult. But, we’ve taken on the challenge. And the only way we will achieve it is through an excellent company and technical ecosystem, the most important part of which is our culture.

Alfred is a combination of human touch, intuition, technology, curated brands, and trusted local providers that come together to bring services and goods past your door, to a new level of quality and personalization. Every day, we are evolving the idea of home to be more of a space that anticipates you. We are an operating system for your life: a thoughtful, honest utility not a luxury. In line with this, we engineer for empathy — and trust — above all else.