Pros
I joined Qualia after looking around for a small company where I'd have a big impact as an engineer, with a lot of room to grow. Qualia has exceeded my expectations and it's a wonderful place to work as an engineer. The product team, the product itself, and the business more broadly are all compelling. Qualia has an amazing product team. It's a product-first company, and the company trusts engineers to make important decisions. Our engineers own whole features or even whole products, and are responsible for building features from architectural planning though design and of course through implementation and testing. I didn't know much about real estate before I visited Qualia, but as soon as I met the team and saw the product, I knew it would be an awesome place to work. We train our new engineers with technical onboarding challenges, and we don't require knowledge of the real estate industry. Qualia has an internal industry training to get you up to speed on the industry. You'll get an onboarding buddy who can answer all of your questions as you work through training and on to your first projects. The company culture is great. The company values generalists, and we have engineers and product managers from a variety of backgrounds. I feel like I've been able to put a lot of my skills to good use. I specifically wanted to avoid working for a company where I'd be another cog in the works, and at Qualia I've been able to learn and grow and handle a lot of different projects. The work-life balance is very good. I get in around 9:30 and leave sometime around 6 for dinner. The office is beautiful, in downtown SF, and we eat catered lunch together every day. The lunch might seem like a small perk, but the company culture of taking a break together for lunch and talking with each other has allowed me to make great friends and to learn a lot about the company and my colleagues, even if I don't work directly with them. I value our lunches for the social time, and of course it's convenient to have food provided. As an engineer, you will get to work on challenging problems, and the company will reward you if you go above and beyond the minimum implementation. For example, I worked hard in my first months here to learn more about UI design, and as a result I was entrusted with designing more and more complex user interfaces. I thought a lot about automated testing, and I got the chance to improve our internal testing systems. I never gave up when debugging on support, and I was able to learn a ton about our products and fix whole categories of tricky bugs. We have awesome development tools. Our CTO is a phenomenal developer, and so is our lead designer. Together they've laid a strong foundation on which we have built our reputation for excellent products and unbelievable speed of implementation. Each engineer runs a full copy of our applications locally, so code reloading is super fast. We use Meteor for all of our apps, and it has enabled us to do some amazing things like latency compensation, syncing data across browsers, and using reactive flow programming to compute complex derived field values in our database. We have tooling built on top of everything to make it fast and fun to use. Engineering is more than writing code. To be an effective engineer, you need a strong sense of the customer's needs and of the values of your company. At Qualia, you'll hear regularly about the business, the customers, and the other products we make. On Fridays, we stop working at 4:00, and we'll often have a talk by one of our founders on the state of the company and the industry, or a talk by a guest speaker in a related field. This extra information will help you make informed decisions on your own, rather than relying on a manager to micromanage your work. If you like being briefed on a high-level need and then set loose to make it happen, you'll thrive at Qualia. Finally, but worth noting, Qualia offers competitive compensation. The salary is very good and the company provides the usual health benefits and unlimited PTO. We have annual performance reviews and promotions are frequent. The company recognizes good work and I feel like management takes my concerns seriously.
Cons
There aren't many cons to working for Qualia. Perhaps the most obvious one is that you might not connect with the mission. Qualia is an ambitious company with a strong business model, but our work is all in the service of the real estate industry, so we don't have the cool factor of a robotics startup or the social mission of a nonprofit. While our benefits and salaries are competitive, they probably aren't on the level of a FAANG company. We're still private so your option grants won't be liquid right away. There's no water slide in the office. That said, Qualia offered me far more than the next-highest offer I got from a startup, so I expect that you'll be pleasantly surprised if you get an offer. The only other con that comes to mind is that our growth, while exciting, has been somewhat disruptive to the company's structure and to our process. We're still figuring out how to coordinate engineering work, how to manage QA resources, how to train new hires just right, and how to document what we've done and why. The company doesn't have the clarity of organizational structure that a larger company might offer, but the benefit is that there is room for you to define your role and to make a difference. You have to be willing to advocate for yourself to do it.