Senior Software Engineer Renu Srinivasan on Turo’s Technologies and Company Culture
When you join a company for its small-team feel and culture, what happens as it grows? For Renu Srinivasan, Turo’s expansion has been an opportunity to explore a host of new technologies while enjoying the same inclusive, collaborative, and flexible environment that drew her to the team four years ago.
What do you do at Turo?
I’m a senior software engineer on our Guest Experience team, which means I work on customer-facing features for the people booking cars online. When I first joined Turo almost four years ago, most of us were full-stack engineers, but as the team has grown, we’ve split up to focus on our preferred platforms. I started doing primarily front-end work a couple of years ago, when we began migrating to React, but I still like to do some back-end work now and then.
How are your teams organized?
We’re broken up into product domains with cross-functional project teams, like the Guest team, that include people from Product, Design, and Engineering. Everyone on the Guest team is here in San Francisco, and we do short standups every other morning, as well as a weekly planning meeting where we get together to talk about what’s coming up.
“Everyone is eager to share what they learn and help each other out. You never feel like you’re on your own.”
We also have what we call guilds for each platform — Frontend, Backend, iOS, Android, etc. Members of a guild are often spread out across different Turo offices, but we meet once every couple of weeks to discuss any issues with the code base and processes specific to our platform. Those meetings are a good opportunity to ask architectural questions or propose changes, especially ones that make a developer’s life easier. But people are also happy to help you out anytime. If you’re working on a piece of code you’re not familiar with or you want help making a decision, you can just ask.
What did you do before Turo, and why did you join?
I started my career as a backend engineer at a couple of corporations in India, on much larger teams. I learned a lot, but the work wasn’t as impactful as what you’d do at a smaller company. Then I came to the U.S. for my master’s, and I interned at Amazon on the AWS team to build an internal tool. After I graduated, I did more frontend work for an education company. I liked working on a smaller team in a full-stack role, but ultimately I wanted a product-oriented role where I could build something more challenging that still directly impacted people’s lives. That led me to Turo. The work and the size of the team here were just what I was looking for, and I could tell from talking with the team that they were collaborative and focused on company culture.
Tell us more about Turo’s culture.
It’s very inclusive, both in terms of our diverse professional backgrounds and in terms of good work-life balance. From the top of the company down, there’s a lot of value placed on personal needs and time — we have nice parental leave benefits, flexible work hours and Turo travel credit. And we’re not expected to work over the weekends. When you’re off, you’re off. We also get a lot of paid time off, and we’re encouraged to use it.
“You can approach anyone, including our CTO, about possible changes or things you want to explore.”
The culture is also very collaborative. Everyone is eager to share what they learn and help each other out. You never feel like you’re on your own. That’s especially true as a new team member — people understand you’re still learning your way around, and they’re proactive about reaching out with advice. I think we’ve evolved a lot since I joined in terms of helping people grow; there’s more structure and leadership in place. But the best parts of the culture haven’t changed. You still have a lot of autonomy and impact on the product, and it still feels like a small team.
What technologies does your team use?
On the back-end we use a Java-based Spring application, and MySQL. The front-end used to be within the same stack, but we’ve migrated to React. On the frontend, we also use Redux, Webpack 4, CSS, and a lot of open-source libraries. I really like that we try to stay on top of major library releases and keep our code base up-to-date. The React and JavaScript communities are pretty fast-paced because so many people are contributing. When one of us sees something new, we’ll share it with the rest of the team and figure out what would be useful to us. Then if there’s interest, we’ll start creating tickets to formalize it. How quickly we move from there depends on how busy we are, but we do try to allocate some time every week or every month to update our code.
What are you looking forward to in your future at Turo?
I look forward to continuing improving Turo’s Guest experience on the web. There are a lot of exciting opportunities and projects in our roadmap to do that. At the same time, I want to work on making our web platform the best it can be, both for developers and our users. Our leaders are also great about recognizing what we’re interested in and helping guide us in the right direction. We talk about our personal goals in regular one-on-ones to make progress, but those conversations aren’t restricted to your manager — you can approach anyone, including our CTO, about possible changes or things you want to explore.
The other exciting thing is that we’re growing so quickly, and there are constantly new people coming in with different backgrounds and experiences. We all get to learn from each other, and I think the dynamic on this team is contagious. People genuinely care about you and want to make sure you’re doing well, which makes you want to pay that forward to the rest of the team.
Interested in joining Renu and her Team? Check out open positions or email Senior Technical Recruiter, Gianni Longmire at gianni@turo.com.
Editor’s Note: To help tell this story, we partnered with Job Portraits, a creative studio that tells stories about fast-growth companies.
