Bad management and leadership, poor pay, good engineers though - Software Engineer Boston Dynamics Employee Review

2.0
Mar 3, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Really smart people working there - Opportunities to learn new things is good - Decent amount of autonomy - Free Lunch - Culture is decent overall

Cons

- HR/People Operations literally do nothing, do not rely on them for anything - Poor management and top level leadership with poor planning and decision making, which leadership never takes responsibility for - They are not profitable and hemorrhaging cash, per the CEO's own words - Poor pay for the experience - Dwindling benefits that seem to be cut more and more each year - Incredibly disorganized and will constantly move you around - Will not recognize your achievements and look for any excuse to not give you a deserved bonus or raise - Little to no upward mobility, best way to get "promoted" is to leave and come back with more experience, but even then you will likely still be underpaid by at least $20k compared to competitors

Explore other reviews about Boston Dynamics

5.0
Dec 8, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazing company culture with people willing to answer all your questions

Cons

There were not enough projects for the interns

3.0
Apr 3, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Lots of smart people to work with. - Lots of interesting robotic hardware to work with. - Interesting projects if you end up on the right team. - Decent pay. - Boston Dynamics makes some of the best robotic hardware in the world.

Cons

- The company culture used to be research focused and now it is product focused. This means you'll be writing code judged at a production standard on top of decades of research-grade code that the higher-ups wrote unless you're working on a green field project. There are mountains of technical debt that management has no incentive to clean up laying around like a mine field. - Because so many smart people want to work on the world's best robots, it's almost impossible to get noticed in a positive way unless you end up with favorable projects, a force you will have no control over. - Strong emphasis is placed on using proprietary logging tools with a very poor developer experience - get ready to spend weeks debugging issues of greater complexity than you find almost anywhere else. - Very much a sink or swim technical culture with little interest shown to supporting employees. - Eroding work/life balance; they used to be properly hybrid but are now essentially full time in-office. - Little to no meaningful testing of robot behavior is properly automated. The company has a huge reliance on manual testing and individual unit tests, with a major deficiency in end-to-end tests that test systems together effectively. - Forward deployed engineers, or as BD calls them Field Application Engineers, are typically under-respected and underpaid.

6
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