We use AI tools ourselves, like to draft job descriptions, sharpen interview questions, and analyze hiring data, for example. But we’ve also thought carefully about where AI adds value and where it gets in the way of something important. These guidelines reflect that thinking.

Our approach

Medium’s operating principles start with Humans first. We put humans before AI, we value authentic perspectives, and we respect the time and attention of our community. We bring the same orientation to hiring. We want to understand how you think, what you care about, and how you approach problems. AI can support that process, but it shouldn’t substitute for it.

That said, we’re not asking you to pretend AI doesn’t exist. We use it, we build products for a world shaped by it, and we think thoughtfully about its role. We expect our candidates to do the same.

Stage-by-stage guidance

Application materials

You’re welcome to use AI to refine your resume or sharpen your cover letter, however for the application questions, we’d like to hear from you and you alone, without AI. Don’t overthink it! What we’re looking for is your genuine experience and perspective.

Take-home assignments

Unless the assignment explicitly invites AI use, please complete it independently. We’re trying to evaluate your individual thinking, problem-solving instincts, and depth of understanding. When in doubt, ask your recruiter!

Interview preparation

Use AI freely here. Research Medium, practice answering questions, stress-test your thinking, prepare thoughtful questions to ask us. Deepening your understanding before an interview — one of our core operating principles — is exactly the kind of preparation we appreciate.

Live interviews

Unless explicitly stated by your recruiter, interviewer, or in writing before the interview, no AI assistance please. Our interviewers want to engage with you, which means we want to experience your thinking, your unique instincts, and your curiosity.

What we’re really looking for

When we think about what makes someone successful at Medium, it maps closely to how we work:

• Humans first: You lead with genuine perspective and care about authentic voice — in your work and in how you engage with others.
• Deepen understanding: You approach problems with curiosity. You ask questions. You want to understand things at depth, not just get to an answer.
• Orient for impact: You’re thoughtful about where to direct energy, and strategic about when a tool genuinely improves your work (and when it doesn’t!).
• Ladder together: You’re transparent. You play it straight. We’re moving through this interview process together.

These are the qualities we’re looking for in the hiring process itself, not just in your work history.

A note on transparency

We’re sharing how we use AI in hiring because we think you deserve to know. We don’t use AI to make final hiring decisions (those will always be made by humans) and we don’t use any information you share with us to train models.

We use AI on your application data for fraud detection purposes and analysis for reporting purposes. We do not share your personal information, and any data is anonymized.

If you have questions about any of this, ask your recruiter. We’d rather have the conversation than leave you guessing!

How does Medium use AI?

In our product

In our product, AI plays a supporting role, like helping readers find relevant content and reducing friction for writers, but it doesn’t create what you read on Medium. Our community does.

• Human-generated content first and always: Our feeds and discovery tools are designed to elevate human writers, never to replace them.
• AI to assist, not to create: Where AI appears in our product, it exists to serve the writing and the reader, but the creative work and thinking is human.

As a workforce

Internally, we support our team in developing AI fluency which can be summed up as understanding what these tools do well, what they don’t, and how to make that call in the moment.

• Fluency and AI readiness: We invest in helping our team work with AI effectively, through shared learning and experimentation.
• Encouragement, not mandate: We want people to develop their own informed point of view, and we want to meet them where we are as we learn together.
• Quality not quantity: AI is a tool and a means to an end, not the whole point. AI use in service of greater impact is the goal — AI slop (in all its forms) is not!

These guidelines reflect where we are today. As AI continues to evolve, we’ll update them. We welcome feedback!

Guidance on AI Use for Medium Candidates was originally published in Jobs at Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medium’s mission is to deepen understanding across the world by building community around shared stories. Our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are a direct reflection of that mission. ERGs are different for every organization, but at Medium, our focus with ERGs is small steps over time that make a large impact.

What are ERGs?

For those unfamiliar, ERGs are groups within a company where employees with shared or similar experiences, backgrounds, and interests come together to support one another, find and cultivate a sense of belonging, and drive positive change within a company.

At Medium, we currently have six ERGs, led by employees at Medium:

POC (People of Color)

For people of color at Medium.

Abilities

For Medium employees who identify as having a disability — officially or unofficially, visible or invisible, disclosed or undisclosed.

Women

For women and women-identifying folks at Medium.

LGBTQIA+

For folks self-identifying within the LGBTQIA+ community to come together.

Parents and Caregivers

For Medium employees who identify as a parent, guardian, or caregiver.

France

For folks who are French, live in France, or have a French contract. (Fun fact: ⅕ of our team is based in France!)

Much of the connection made within our ERGs takes place in their private Slack channels where articles, information, ideas, conversations, and humor are shared. Our ERGs often help plan, host, or sponsor all-company heritage month events, like Deep Dives with experts in a relevant field.

For example, during Latin American heritage month, we were lucky to have our POC ERG bring in David Bowles to join us for a company-wide talk on his work and the Latin American experience. And in a session sponsored by the Abilities ERG, we welcomed Isaac Harvey MBE for a deep dive on accessibility and how he engages with the internet. These bridges our ERGs build play an important role in helping shape our company culture and our product.

Our ERGs are part of our commitment to fostering an inclusive work culture that supports diverse perspectives and identities; they’re just one way we continue to help everyone deepen their understanding of the world.

Sound like a workplace that matches what you’re looking for? Consider joining the team! Learn more about our open roles on our Careers page.

ERGs at Medium was originally published in Jobs at Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A window into how we work at Medium — here are the principles that guide our actions and decision-making

At Medium, we have four operating principles that guide how we work and act as a compass for decision-making. They were written collaboratively to describe the most important and unique elements of Medium’s culture.

Humans first

Humans are the core of everything we do. This is what makes Medium different: We value humans, and every decision we make has the best interests of our community of readers and writers in mind. This means that we respect the time and attention of our reader and writer communities; we recommend the most informed writers, not the loudest; we put humans before AI; we protect our community of readers and writers; and we promote deeper understanding, not misunderstanding or division. We collaborate often and we proactively seek feedback and ideas from people with different perspectives.

Deepen understanding

Medium exists to help readers and writers deepen understanding of the world. This is our mission and it’s also how we approach our work; it is our bar for excellence. Achieving a deep understanding of our platform is essential to how we work, because we are a two-sided platform and changes to our product will impact our community. To do this well, we approach projects and problems with curiosity. We get context, ask questions, analyze data, and take time to understand different opinions.

Orient for impact

We only give our attention to things that we believe will have clear potential for impact. We value focus and depth over trying to do everything, and we find ways to measure the effects of our work. We’re both a mission-driven company and a for-profit business, which means that we define impact based on profit and purpose. We balance effort and energy with ROI and impact.

Ladder together

This determines how we work: We move forward in rapid, incremental, impactful steps that connect to each other. We have a bias towards action, but not just for the sake of activity. Actions not only produce impact, they also connect to past actions and unblock future actions. The combination of these characteristics creates a ladder. We can design steps in a project to ladder together and design roadmaps so that projects ladder together. This style of working creates a drumbeat of progress. We support each other to move towards our shared goals, learn, and iterate together.

Putting words into action

We aim to create a culture of respect, collaboration, and ambition, one that embodies these operating principles as more than just words. But words do not define a culture; people do.

While plenty of organizations stick their values into a handbook, we call ours operating principles because they frequently guide how we operate. We reference them when we collaborate, when we disagree, and when we choose what to prioritize. By framing our decisions through these principles, we can ensure that Medium’s actions align with its culture.

We’re building a company where we put humans first, deepen understanding, orient for impact, and ladder together, all in pursuit of making the internet a better, more human place.

If these values spark inspiration and energy for you when you read them, consider joining the team! Learn more about our open roles on our Careers page.

Medium’s Operating Principles was originally published in Jobs at Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Careers at Medium

Help us build the best place to read and write on the internet.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Medium has been made aware of a scam that involves offering people jobs at Medium. Please do not engage with offers that look similar to this. All our open positions are available here.

View all open positions

At Medium, we believe in the power of words — and we’re on a mission to bring the world’s expertise to life through memorable storytelling. Our platform rewards great writing and puts power back in the hands of readers. Medium’s subscription model means we rely on our members, not ads. We’re looking for teammates who are inspired by our mission, who are deeply thoughtful and empathetic, and who are passionate about the future of online publishing. Sound like you? Keep reading!

Note: Medium only hires and communicates via greenhouse.io, our third-party recruiting platform. If you you receive job offers for Medium via LinkedIn or other platforms, it may be a scam; please verify it by contacting us at help.medium.com.

Why work at Medium

A meaningful mission

From our engineers to our content ops team, employees at Medium (aka “Medians”) are driven by passion, vision, and purpose. We believe in building a high-quality, open platform for sharing ideas — free from harassment, hate speech, and other harmful content. We strive to create a diverse, inclusive place for everyone to feel seen, safe, and supported, both on our product and within our organization.

Remote-first culture

Collaborate with colleagues from Paris to Portland: Medium is a 100% remote workplace. We’ll provide you with what you need to do your best work, including a stipend for home office expenses, Wi-Fi reimbursement, and a local co-working space membership. (We also know how valuable it is to meet your team IRL, so we hold an all-company retreat twice a year.)

A creative environment

We’re building a culture, not just a product. We believe in experimentation, innovation, and collaboration. We give hi5s and lightning talks and all-company presentations about the ambitious challenges we’re tackling. We share travel photos in our Slack #watercooler channel and craft fun playlists for Thursday writing hours. We question ideas in product workshops, learn from the expertise of our colleagues, and create new things together.

Generous benefits

Comprehensive health insurance, 401(k) plans, parental leave, and unlimited paid time off are just the start. Our values show up in your benefits: We provide support for your wellbeing at home, education and professional development, financial advising, mental health support, and more.

Join Our Team

View all open positions

Read our guidance on AI use for candidates. We believe human ideas have the power to change how people think, for the better. That belief shapes how we hire. We use AI tools ourselves, but we’ve thought carefully about where it adds value and where it gets in the way of something important.

Learn more about Medium

The Medium Blog

Work at Medium was originally published in Jobs at Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here at Medium, we realize that being asked to solve an unfamiliar problem on a whiteboard, is not the same as coding in your favorite IDE while listening to your favorite tunes. The goal of our interview process is to predict how you’ll perform once you join our team. Since interviewing ability has almost no correlation with employee effectiveness, we do our best to adjust our expectations.

This post will be your study guide as we’ll cover suggested reading material, our evaluation criteria, and finally some tips on interviewing.

Recommended reading

Please take some time to read through the following posts as they not only describe our engineering culture, but also how we value bringing together a team with different perspectives, life experiences, and educational backgrounds. More importantly, we’ve publicized our engineering rubric so you can walk in on the day of your interview feeling like you’re ready to ace a midterm.

• Engineering interviews: refining our process
• The Stack That Helped Medium Drive 2.6 Millennia of Reading Time
• Engineering Values

Check out the Medium Engineering Blog for more

The interview process

We conduct several different types of interviews around coding, system design, career history, and employee values. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to be good at everything. The whole point of the interview is to understand your boundaries — areas in which you excel, as well as your limitations. Chances are if you’re amazing at one thing, you can be amazing at other things, right? The good news is that Medium is an environment that fosters a growth mindset, so you’ll have many opportunities to develop your craft.

Step 1: Exploratory. AKA the friendly “get to know you over a cup of coffee” stage. This initial chat will cover highlights in your work experience, your aspirations, and a quick summary on Medium‘s roadmap and the problems we’re solving. We want to make sure there’s mutual interest and values alignment before moving into technical screens.

Step 2: Technical Interview. This is a one-hour interview with a Medium engineer where you’ll be asked to complete a coding exercise. We emphasize coding ability in our process, so it’s important to show interviewers your ability to write clean, maintainable, extensible code. This step can be done in-person or remotely via collabedit/coderpad (we’ll have a laptop for you for in-person interviews).

Step 3: Onsite Interview. The final interview panel runs about 5 hours with an hour break for lunch.

• Coding x 2. Similar to the initial technical screen, you will be asked to complete two additional coding challenges.
• System design. We’ll be asking you to design a system that performs a given task. The prompt will be open-ended, so remember to effectively communicate your familiarity with complex systems and your approach to design.
• Career history. A non-technical interview reviewing how you to got to where you are today. We want to hear about your biggest achievements, toughest challenges, high/low points, and anything else about who you are.
• Q&A. This is an unstructured Q&A with a member of the leadership team. Take advantage of this opportunity to get all of your questions answered about our engineering org.

Some tips on coding and design

We understand the stressful conditions of a 60-minute technical interview, so we’d like your input on how we can most effectively assess your technical ability. If you’re not comfortable whiteboarding, or like to spend a few minutes brainstorming alone, please let your recruiter know and we’ll do our best to accommodate. Here are some additional suggestions to help you prepare for your interview:

• Read through these tips on whiteboarding.
• Understand the problem. If any part of the requirements seem unclear, ask the interview for clarification. You don’t want to start off making the wrong assumptions.
• Plan ahead. Don’t jump straight into coding without thinking through the nature of the problem and a high-level structure/implementation.
• Break down the problem. For more complex problems, we look for the ability to provide simplified, well-factored solutions that break things down into something more manageable.
• Communicate your thought process. This will make it easier for the interviewer to provide guidance if you get stuck. You’re not here to answer CS trivia, but we do want you to have an understanding of what’s going on beneath the hood.
• Think about edge cases. Walk through your code to make sure it produces the right result. You should try to come up with a solution that handles most if not all edge cases.

Hopefully you found this guide helpful. We’re always looking for ways we can improve our process, so please send us your thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to interview with us and good luck!