You’re a Gem! A first look at our Rotational Product Engineering Program for new graduates
The program launches in Summer 2021
Gem’s mission is to enable companies to build relationships with top talent. Gone are the days when recruiting teams relied on inbound applications.
The best companies are proactively engaging with talent months or even years before they’re ready to interview. This is especially true in tech, where talented software engineers are highly sought-after. As you look for your first engineering job after graduation, you can afford to be selective. You have goals, and somewhere out there is the company that will best help you meet them.
We wrote this article to describe who we are and what our Rotational Product Engineering Program can help you accomplish. We tried to be as transparent as possible so you can make the best decision possible as you begin your engineering career — we want you to find your ideal company as much as we want companies to find their ideal candidates.
Who is Gem?
Our company name refers to a certain type of candidate that founders, hiring managers, and recruiters spend time chasing — in short, a “gem” is someone who is a uniquely perfect fit for a given team. Our own definition of a Gem has evolved as our team has grown, but parts persist: we’re humble, we value diversity, we move with velocity, and we’re driven to build a product people love. On our engineering team, we have a philosophy of product engineering that encapsulates a lot of these values.
Product Engineers at Gem own features (or products) from end-to-end — from the database to the interface and from initial idea to successful launch.
Our primary motivation as a team is always to solve problems for our customers. That may mean delving into difficult technical challenges, but we’d rather ship a working solution quickly than keep users waiting while we search for perfection. In a way, we each act as a founder of our respective features. We’re individually trusted to build what makes good product- and business-sense, we’ll wear any number of hats as needed, and we work one-on-one with customers to ensure we’re iterating toward the best solution.
This way of doing things has kept us uniquely responsive to customer needs, which has helped us grow to over 300 customers in just 3 years. As we’ve scaled, we’ve thought about how to preserve this philosophy and the individual ownership it entails beyond the context of a small team, where outsized ownership comes naturally. With that in mind, we devised the Rotational Product Engineering Program to better formalize the concept and bring on more folks who align with it.
What the Rotational Product Engineering Program Will Look Like
As a Product Engineer at Gem, you will take projects from ideation to production — working directly with users and cross-functional partners in product, design, sales, and customer success to build the best product for users. This is a unique opportunity to wear multiple hats, learn about all aspects of a startup, and be involved in the entire product iteration process.
Each cohort in the rotational program will consist of 3–6 new grad Product Engineers joining Gem around the same time. The program will give each person the opportunity to work on at least 3 multi-month projects within the first year, giving exposure to different parts of the product and members of the team. During the first year, we’ll also organize off-sites, social events, and dedicated time with cross-functional leaders so you can explore all parts of the business.
If your interest is already piqued, we’d love to hear from you! Email nathalie@gem.com if you’d like to keep updated. 😄
An Interview with Gem’s Early Career Engineers
To learn more about what we have to offer to early-career engineers, we interviewed two of our interns, Branko Vidovic and Michelle Teplitski, and Lucy Yu, a full-time Product Engineer, about their experiences here.
Lucy, I thought I’d start by asking you how you came to join Gem
Lucy: I attended a happy hour at Gem and there was a clear sense of direction and velocity that appealed to me. I was in San Francisco at the time working on Cactus, a social platform for close friends, and I was having the opposite experience. My co-founder and I weren’t sure that our app was solving a pressing problem and it was hard to find product/market fit — a great way to find P/M fit is through trial and error with real users, but when you’re in a crowded space like social media, users expect something polished right away. In contrast, Gem is a B2B SaaS company solving a pressing problem in a space that isn’t overly crowded yet. That makes for a much friendlier environment to experiment in, and they had already succeeded in finding P/M fit. I was starting to think that at my stage of personal growth, it would be good to learn from people who had already brought a product past that point, if I wanted to do so myself in the future.
Would you say you’ve been able to learn those skills at Gem?
Lucy: Definitely. I’ll give the example of Gem Jobs. This is an Applicant Tracking System for staffing agencies that we’re now selling as a separate module from the core product. I got to build this from scratch in my first few months at Gem — usually you don’t get to work on something like this until you’re more senior, and I was able to have end-to-end ownership. I quickly got the experience of carrying a product from ideation and design to launch and iteration. I also got to lead conversations with customers, and learned how to get the most value from those.
You came up with the idea of the Rotational Product Engineering Program at Gem. Do you envision it as a “founders school”?
Lucy: Not exactly. There’s some overlap, but the program is foremost about product engineering. I’ve seen how effective this approach can be at Gem, and at Asana during my internship there — they have a great post on the topic. Product engineering is a perfect fit for someone who just loves building great products for users — it allows you to focus on exactly that, without the distractions that come with being a founder, such as selling or pitching to investors. It’s also a great starting point to explore different specializations, because you’re doing a little bit of everything. I could see people branching into pure front-end or pure back-end engineering roles, product management or product design. The program is a way to gain this wide range of industry experience rapidly, whatever your future path.
Branko and Michelle, you both recently finished 4-month internships at Gem — how did your experience differ from other internships you’ve had?
Branko: I would say I had a lot more trust placed in me while still being supported. In most internships, you’re assigned a predefined project with narrow specifications, and when you deviate, you start hearing “No” right away. Most projects I worked on at Gem were somewhat predefined, but there were times that I had identified the problem myself in conversation with customers or by reading through logs. In any case, once there was a defined problem, it was up to me to determine the best solution. Of course, I often needed some support to arrive at that solution — that usually that came in the form of my mentor putting me in touch with the relevant domain experts on the team, who would guide me in the right direction. It’s a subtle difference, but it felt like I was the one solving the problem with support from my teammates, as opposed to just implementing someone else’s idea.
Michelle: I agree with Branko. It was liberating to have that kind of autonomy and be treated as a fellow engineer on the team. At other companies, I was actively dissuaded from pursuing solutions to problems I’d found, and at Gem I was actively encouraged — even if it would mean some learning-by-doing. This was a huge area of growth for me: learning to go through the full process of identifying a problem, designing a working solution, devising the implementation, and iterating on customer feedback once it was launched — and more generally, learning to work through problems independently.
Another unique thing was the velocity of the team. You’re encouraged to test solutions with real customers right away, and even the infrastructure is set up to support this: there’s a very thin QA layer and it’s easy to set the number of users a new feature will go out to. It’s practically just the dev environment, then launch. And code reviews happen quickly. People aren’t nit-picky. This leads to very rapid iteration with customers, so it’s hard to get lost down a wrong turn, and you feel like you’re having an impact on real customers every day.
The fast pace also meant that I was able to touch a lot of different projects. I worked on audit logging for the Sales and Customer Success teams, a candidate blacklisting feature for our customers, and an infra project that helped Gem process emails with less computational power.
Branko: Yeah, that was also unique. In a short time I got to work on three customer-facing features. I built out search in the Gem chrome extension, a feature to load email content in search within the Gem app, as well as blacklisting and report sharing features. All of these involved, at some point, hopping on calls with customers to get their feedback. At first, Michelle and I were shadowing Lucy and our Head of Product Sarah on these calls, but eventually we got to lead them ourselves. That alone was a lot of trust to place in an intern.
Anything more you’d like to add? Would you recommend Gem to a new grad?
Branko: I’ll be returning to Gem myself, so that’s a definite yes! I guess a big piece we haven’t talked about is how connected you are to the rest of the team. There are a lot of cross-team interactions — not just with PMs and designers as you would expect, but also with Sales, Customer Success, and recruiting. Engineers present on new features they’ve built at All-Hands meetings, alongside salespeople presenting on deals they’ve won, or that they’ve lost. I got to lead one of these presentations, and it makes you feel that your work is seen and appreciated by the whole company. You’ll also find yourself in conversations with members of the recruiting team, who use Gem themselves. It was great to have a customer in the building that you can talk to.
Michelle: I’d recommend Gem to new grads, too! With the combination of ownership you’re handed and support you get from teammates, it’s a great place to learn a lot of essential engineering skills quickly. That, and there are dogs. Lots and lots of dogs.
