StackRox

Our structure and processes are geared towards allowing our small-but-mighty team to deliver a great product that delights our customers.

Broadly speaking, a subset of our team focuses exclusively on the frontend component, while the rest focus primarily — but not exclusively -- on the backend components. Each backend component has a set of owners, who are responsible for its long-term maintenance.

However, this structure is quite fluid, and everyone in our team is comfortable working with different components depending on what needs to be done. This flexibility has the added benefit of allowing us to move quickly -- we frequently evolve our architecture, adding, modifying and removing new components as we enhance our product.

We strive to be iterative in how we deliver features, shipping in increments and collecting customer feedback frequently. We plan our work in sprints that last three weeks. At the end of each sprint, we ship a new release to our customers.

Each project that we work on is executed by a team of engineers, who own it end-to-end, from design to implementation to testing. When new projects start out, the engineers working on it share a design document with the broader team, iterate on it rapidly based on peer feedback, and proceed to implement it. During the implementation phase of a project, the engineers working on it collaborate closely, review each other’s pull requests, and communicate status proactively and often with the broader team.

We process a lot of data, in real-time, from our customers’ Kubernetes clusters — from the filesystems in their images to the processes that run in their containers. Coupled with the fact that our product runs in some of the largest and fastest-growing Kubernetes environments that exist, this means that we have our work cut out for us when it comes to handling scale.

We deal with data sources that span many components of the stack, which requires us to leverage deep systems knowledge. This involves, for example, stitching together system calls, file names and IP addresses with Kubernetes deployments and network policies.

Our product is responsible for securing key components of the infrastructure. This means that our systems need to be highly robust while still being very low-touch for regular maintenance or upgrades.

Our product is focused on Kubernetes security. Since Kubernetes and the surrounding ecosystem are evolving rapidly, there are always new technologies and developments that our product needs to keep up with — from containerd and eBPF to Istio and Helm.