Welcome to the Kombo Engineering Hiring Process. We are excited to spend time with you as we move through the next steps of the process. We want to set some expectations with you on the process and show you what you can do to prepare.
We have designed our process to be fair to you and us, and be mindful of each other’s time. The process always goes both ways (you can see if you can imagine working with us, and we can imagine working with you). We generally try to complete every process within 2 weeks and usually make offers 1-2 days after the on-site.
Get to know the people you might talk to: Who You'll Meet During the Process
We grew to almost 70 people, but we have been very deliberate about the culture we want. Our culture is a mix of Silicon Valley-pilled hackers/nerds, who work hard and are led by love and mutual respect. We know this culture is not for everyone, and that’s okay. We would rather be honest with you on this than put you in a position that frustrates you or waste both of our time.
We are an engineering-driven, in-person, high-intensity place. Most people are in around 9 to 10 and out around 7 to 8, with weekends off. We practice radical candor in both directions, humility over status games, and transparency by default (all company metrics are visible to every employee, and all customer calls and internal meetings are recorded). Read our Values for more on this.
The Kombo UI is not used by hundreds of thousands of users and is rather “lean” on the frontend. Most of the complexity we cover sits on the backend, so if you come in expecting to spend lots of time on frontend work or are excited about A/B testing, you might be disappointed. Read more here: Overview of the Kombo Product [tech perspective]
All 4 Founders are engineers, 50% of our team consists of ex-founders or people who want to start a company in the future. We work on hard and ambitious problems and are here to build a generational company. Engineers own problems end-to-end. We don’t have a ticket backlog. Our company relies heavily on individuals' initiative and ownership. Depending on someone’s life situation, a workplace that expects this level of intensity may not be the right fit.
Over the next 3 years, we want Kombo to become the engineering company in Berlin known for our excellent product and great culture. Think of what Stripe became for online payments, and that’s what we will become for B2B integrations.
You don’t need to read everything here. We just collected the resources that we kept sending out repeatedly. If you find anything outdated or contradictory, please flag it with us.