Element Analytics
At Element, we're inspired by people who work at industrial companies on day-to-day operations, who keep the lights on and provide so much of the world’s living necessities. We provide them with technology that removes existing obstacles and enables them to realize the full potential of their capabilities. Our mission is to make industrial data incredibly easy to use, and turn it into insight that people can act on to achieve new levels of operational performance. We're a team of industry veterans, data scientists and engineers, analytical and creative thinkers. We thrive on solving hard problems and turning data into real-world impact.
Why join us?
We're solving inherently hard problems with significant real-world implications - this is no cat meme app we're developing here. This is software that the largest heavy industrial companies in the world are already relying on to improve their operations by building a better understanding of their operational data.
We're a small company with a lot of work to do. Great engineers can start and immediately have a big impact, as there's a lot of ground yet to cover and ways to make your mark. Additionally, due to our smaller size, you will have the opportunity to solve problems in novel ways using the best technology available - you really get to shape the future of our platform.
The business has signed more new customers (not just PoCs) in the first quarter of 2019 than we'd signed in the whole year of 2018. The commercial side of the business is blowing up, and the most fun parts are still to come.
We are backed by a great consortium of both financial and strategic investors. This mix gives us great credibility on both Sand Hill Road (the home of the Silicon Valley VCs) and with our customers' senior executives. We have raised over $20m to date, with plans to raise more next year.
We are a great place to work, and it shows in our numbers. Our employee retention rate is over 90% every year since the company was founded.
Engineering at Element Analytics
We run an agile process, with teams operating on 2 week sprints. Those get grouped together into what we call relays which are comprised of 4 sprints, 1 week of pure engineering time for fixing tech debt, investigating new tools, and beyond, then what we call Hack Week
where we give people time to innovate on their own. These semi-structured weeks give us the breathing room to innovate, which is so key to a small company (and to a large one) but the biggest reason I personally like them? It's a heck of a lot of fun!
Many successful companies have a challenge that grow from their success - the idea is simple and can be easy for a small subset, but they become difficult at scale as the size of the systems and the number of the users grow.
Element has a different issue - we work on something that's inherently complex and this adds 2 very interesting challenges that we'll discuss here.
1) Our product is about data, and because it's the customers' data, we don't (can't) have a model for it - we only have a meta-model and must engineer from that. It must be flexible enough to be useful across a very wide set of use cases, but opinionated enough to allow us to lean on the abstraction which leads to some very interesting design tradeoffs and lively discussions around the office.
2) Because the data is generated elsewhere and the set of transformations on that data are user defined, there's a very interesting convergence of two problems of building user-defined, but reactive systems (and keeping that simple enough that we're not just giving them a Scala IDE and saying Have at it Folks!
).
You'd be working on overhauling our data ingest APIs to support a more nuanced data model: one with better semantics to support downstream operations as per challenge #1 above and higher performance to support more and more time series data.
You'd implement
evergreening
, our answer to how the systems react to incoming data and how those changes propagate through our system and back to our customers, per challenge #2.You'd be working on plain old scaling - how to squeeze more performance out of our spark cluster and how do we better support interactive Spark workloads. There's no behavior change to the services, though there may be some clever ways to solve the performance issue through innovating on the UX such that the same performance has a better experience.
Working at Element Analytics
We are a company that has been very intentional about our culture, guided by our 6 core values, which are:
People-Centric Experiences - We design and build technology that puts people first. It molds to their needs and behavior, and enables them through intuitive user experiences to do what they do best, faster.
Simplicity - We seek to understand complexity and simplify it. We value simplicity because it's easily understood and helps people focus on what’s most important.
Humility - We listen, we learn, and we enjoy building things with smart people who are made better by working as a team.
Honest Growth - We focused on growth without shortcuts. We're honest with ourselves and the people we work with; honest growth is the only kind of real, sustainable growth.
Experiential Diversity - We respect, value, and seek out each other’s diverse perspectives. An encouraging, diverse environment brings out the best in everyone and surfaces new ideas and opportunities. Together, we arrive at the optimal solution.
A Scientific Approach - We apply the scientific method to problem-solving. We hypothesize and test assumptions, continuously and rapidly iterate based on results. Testing before building allows us to make better decisions and create the most impactful solutions.
-
Maternal/Paternal Leave
We have a lot of folks with little ones at home and we believe in giving people time with their families. Especially when they're really little and no one is getting any sleep. To help with that, we offer 12 weeks (14 for C-Sections) of 100% paid leave for the birthing parent, and 6 weeks for the non-birthing parent.
We also have a
Flexible Return to Work
policy, to help parents transition back to their regular work schedule after their parental leave expires. We know it is tough to get back into the swing of things! The amount of time over which this transition occurs is decided on a case by case basis, but is typically 2-4 weeks.
-
Generous Vacation
Element has an unlimited vacation policy in effect as long as you are getting all of your work done. Get some time on the beach (or in the mountains, if that's your thing).
-
Free Food
We provide catered lunches a couple of times as week, plus office snacks and drinks and a weekly Happy Hour on Thursday evenings at the office where you'll often find the team playing board games.
-
Flexible Hours
Everyone works their own hours, with a focus on getting work done over spending time at your desk. Feel free to work from home on occasion (most of engineering works from home once a week) if you need some quiet to get work done. As long as you're around for key team and department meetings, we're less concerned about the hours, or where you're working.
-
Health Insurance
We have a wide range of high quality and affordable health care options though our Professional Employment Organization, Sequoia One. Currently, we offer HMO policies through Kaiser and Anthem Blue Cross, as well as a PPO policy through Anthem, for those of you who like a little choice in your care. We also offer Dental and Vision. We pay 100% of the premium for our employees, and 80% for dependents, should you have any to add. We also offer an FSA for all that additional stuff, like eyeglasses and any out-of-pocket costs that might come up.
-
Transportation
We offer all commuters a stipend of $130/mo to ease the cost of your public transit commute.
-
Beautiful Office
We're located in a beautiful old building on Bryant Street in SF with 14" ceilings and a light airy feel to the office.
-
Pet Friendly
Bring in your well behaved dog to the office! We love dogs.
-
401(k) Contribution
We offer a 401(k) plan through Mass Mutual.
External Links
Interested in this company?
Skip straight to final-round interviews by applying through Triplebyte.