Sensei

Software Engineering at Sensei supports two business organizations – Farms and Retreats – with a team focused on each division. Both teams operate using agile development principles with two-week sprints, daily status, and regular backlog groomings and retrospectives.

Each team has a Product Manager responsible for collecting business needs, evaluating sourcing strategies for specific technological needs, then crafting the roadmap including feature definition. Engineers are expected to be engaged with the product team and provide interactive feedback during the design, implementation, and testing of features.

Most coding is individual, but design review and discussion of challenges are strongly encouraged in Slack. Some work is delegated to external contractors who also maintain a presence in Slack.

Both teams are using private GitHub repos for SCC, with well-defined branching models and typical PR processes.

There is a QA team that is currently providing manual testing but is moving towards automation.

Some of the software is running CI, but deployment is generally manually controlled. The team is hiring an SRE to improve tooling and processes.

Current challenges are fairly common in early-stage startups: forming architectural designs and components, establishing patterns, and growing the team. Expected challenges include scaling services, multimodal data analysis, continuous improvement of developer experience, abstracting complex integrations, and iteratively improving architecture across multiple stacks.