Upstart’s Engineering Values

At Upstart, our mission is to provide effortless credit based on true risk. We have a massive opportunity to make a difference in the way people get access to credit, and that drives our engineering team to do great work.

We’ve experienced a lot of growth as a company in recent years. In a growing organization, culture can become a difficult thing to define in the midst of so much change. We aren’t the same organization that we were two years ago when things were much smaller.

Every group of people will naturally have a set of culture values, whether they proactively define them or let them organically emerge. We would prefer to be explicit about our cultural values so that we can preserve our core values as the organization grows. Growth brings change, but we want to remain focused on these three core values for our engineering team.

Insist on High Standards

We strive to do the engineering fundamentals flawlessly so that we can move fast at a high level of quality. We proactively reduce friction and bureaucracy so engineers are as effective as possible. If we do this well, we will be able to move quickly to take advantage of opportunities in a highly competitive market. We need our technical systems to be a competitive advantage, not something that holds us back.

As an engineer, you are expected to hold a high standard for your own work product as well as that of your peers. We want you to have a high bar for product quality, technical design, and continuous improvement of our systems. If you see a problem in the organization, find a way to be a part of the solution.

We view failure as an opportunity to learn and improve. We optimize for fast feedback, fast learning, and fast improvement. While ​​we want to move fast, we recognize that being in fintech demands an incredibly high bar for correctness and quality. We believe moving fast and high quality are not mutually exclusive. Continuous improvement towards maintainable code, automated tests, frequent deployments, and flexible systems leads to both quality and speed.

End to End Ownership

We think of engineers as creative problem solvers and our driving force for disrupting the credit market. Engineers have end-to-end responsibility for design, implementation, testing, rollout, and monitoring of new features. Engineers engage in problems from start to finish, understand business goals, and why they build what they build.

We believe leadership is a set of behaviors able to be demonstrated at all levels of the organization. You don’t have to have “manager” in your job title to be a leader. In order to scale the company, we need leaders at all levels to help us get there. Our goal is to have leaders at all levels and increase ownership and innovation everywhere in the organization, which we believe will lead to better results.

Think Team First

We are a collaborative, team-first organization. We value strong collaboration and communication skills, because everything we do is in the context of a team. Our effectiveness is strongly dependent on our ability to communicate and collaborate together.

Being team-first requires you to be selfless, humble, empathetic, and have high emotional intelligence. We value goals over roles, and success of teams over individuals. Be kind to others, be humble and open-minded, and prioritize others’ productivity over your own. Focus on the long-term and grow engineers who will be better than you.

Summary

We believe in these principles because we want to do great things that make an impact in the world, and we believe that these principles can help us achieve great things. We will inevitably fall short from time to time, but we strive to live up to these principles on a daily basis.

If these principles resonate with you, we would love it if you would consider joining our team!