Why Work at Valassis?
Sarah Atai
A year and a half ago, I started my journey as an HR Business Partner to the Engineering team at Valassis. You never know what to expect what you start something new, but being a partner to the Engineering team has been a fantastic experience. The culture here is unlike anyplace else I’ve worked and I’ve come to have a deep appreciation for the people I work with every day.
People have often asked me what I love about my job and I’ve never had quite the right words to describe what makes this unique culture so engaging. But recently, we surveyed some of our top engineers to find out what they value in our culture. As I read through their responses, I found myself nodding and smiling at the comments — a great articulation of what makes our culture great.
From the perspective of our engineers, some of the best things about our culture are:
We have brilliant, collaborative people. I’ve found that the first response I get when I ask engineers what makes this company great is always “the people”. We have some truly brilliant people here. But what sets Valassis apart is not just the fact that our people are smart — it’s that they truly want to share their expertise and are open to being challenged. A theme that echoed through the survey responses was that even the most senior engineers are incredibly approachable; they are open to mentoring others; everyone is willing to discuss problems openly to derive the best solution. We get to the best result by being curious, open to new approaches, and sharing our perspective with others.
We are high performers. People truly want to be their best here. We take performance management seriously and work to create an environment where everyone brings their best self to work each day. We have a clear career path that helps associates understand the expectations of each career level. Development and growth is not an option here; it’s a way of life.
We work on cutting edge technology. I am consistently impressed when I hear about the cool things our engineers work on. Our software processes 20x the search requests that Google handles on a given day — and each request is handled in less than 100 milliseconds. Unreal! While I just get to brag to my friends about the cool things we do at Valassis, our engineers are knee-deep in solving these technical challenges day in and day out. It’s pretty cool stuff and many of our engineers are jazzed to come to work every day for this reason.
We work in a high-trust, flexible environment. “Trust” and “flexibility” are becoming buzzwords these days, with many companies claiming to offer them. In my experience though, sometimes they are just that: words and not practices. Our engineers report that the high degree of trust and flexibility they have to balance their personal and professional lives is one more thing that makes Valassis a great place to work.
We have fun. One thing that really struck me when I started here is how authentic people are. They bring their whole selves to work, quirks and all! It’s a very casual environment, with a lot of humor and fun. I have never laughed so much at work as I have at Valassis, and this theme echoed through the engineers’ responses. Our regular board game nights and social events are great examples of the fun we have, but for me, it’s more about the random humor on Slack that gets me laughing on a random Tuesday.

As I’m typing this, I’m sitting in the back of the room at our Engineering Conference. Twice a year, we host an internal conference that gives associates an opportunity to share their knowledge with each other. The current presenter, donned in a t-shirt and blue jeans, is sharing a highly technical presentation about some of the great work he’s doing — but the presentation is interspersed with hilarious video clips. To me, it’s the perfect embodiment of our culture: a diverse group of people, committed to finding the best solutions to complex problems, teaching and learning and sharing information but laughing all the way.
Does this sound like the place for you? Check out our Careers page!
