As a software engineer, great place to work - Software Engineer Dataminr Employee Review

(I wrote this because a prospective employee contacted me wanting to learn more about the company, so I thought I'd share it publicly) I've been working at Dataminr for over a year and I'm very much enjoying it. The backend engineering team is about 20 people, all of them are great to work with. Being a smaller team, I feel like I’ve been able to have a huge impact on the company (~200 employees currently I think). Also the new ideas are always piling up, so there’s a variety of challenges to address. For engineers, the organizational structure is very flat; half of us report to the CTO and half report to the Chief Data Scientist. We’re also grouped into SCRUM teams. We have a team lead and a product manager, but design is up to me and most of my work is self-directed anyway.* I’ll be honest about the state of the engineering: older parts can be pretty bad. Every company has this to some degree I’m sure. Fortunately, I’ve been given free reign to redesign and rewrite things as I see fit. I feel very trusted that I’m writing and testing my code correctly, and I’m able to bring in useful tools to do that with. This has significantly improved the reliability of critical services. After all, if I release bad code, clients who are making serious decisions based on our output will be impacted! That gets at another part of the satisfaction of working here: Dataminr literally saves lives. Though few know it, we have a significant impact on the world because so many major news organizations are using Dataminr to find breaking news. As far as company culture, it’s great. We have happy hours and various themed parties. We regularly have company sports teams playing soccer, kickball, softball, etc, if that’s your thing. It is an open office layout, for better or for worse. We have lunch provided every day as well as a kitchen that’s always well stocked with snacks and food, which means there’s always lots of interaction going on there. I’m friends with a lot of my coworkers and regularly hang out with folks from work outside of the office. tldr: yup, definitely recommend working here *-I actually checked our ticket tracker and over 3/4s of my tickets were ones I created myself.