Pros
This remains to be an extremely flat and open organization. People are friendly and helpful. Titles matter insofar as accountability, not privilege. As an individual, I feel trusted to do my best work. If you work at other organizations long enough, you will probably learn to bend some rules to get things done. Here, there are very few hard and fast rules (just those prescribing ethical conduct and protecting customer interests). How we work is left up to the team / individual. What we have is a set of best practices that evolve as we learn and grow. In fact, all the biggest shifts in our engineering practices and tooling began as someone experimenting with something new, and as more people saw the benefits and voluntarily adopted that thing, it became the norm. This level of autonomy also means that if I see something not working well, whether it is technical or organizational, it is within my realm of responsibility to raise the concern and work toward a better outcome. And by the way, the technology space is a rapidly advancing one with lots of interesting problems and tremendous needs. You get the satisfaction of building stuff that people will appreciate!
Cons
There's always more work than we have time and people for. It's important to pace oneself, set realistic expectations, and maintain boundaries. Management is very respectful and supportive of that. The rapid pace of product development means what you know from a year ago may not hold true anymore. It is also hard for documentation to keep up. We still rely on a fair amount of tribal knowledge. It's something the team is trying to improve. Nevertheless working here means you have to be comfortable with that, and not be shy about asking questions. Because of the self-directed culture and the nature of a startup, being able to navigate ambiguity, find help, be helpful, and solve open-ended problems is key to thriving at mabl. It's not a cushy environment. Figuring out how to do that is quite challenging but equally rewarding.