Console

How engineering works at Grit

How are the teams structured?

We're an early stage company, so it's only six of us right now. It’s a very flat hierarchy: everyone is empowered to commit anywhere in the monorepo and engineers mostly build features end-to-end. Of course, people have their areas of expertise but overall we aim for minimal boundaries.

What tools do engineers use?

• Version Control: GitHub
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Issue Management: GitHub Issues
• Monitoring and Error tracking: We run on GCP so use the full Google Cloud Monitoring suite.

Can developers pick their own tools?

We don't prescribe what you have on your workstation. If you want to use Linux, that's fine; if you want to use Windows, that's fine too. Most of the team is using a Mac, but we provide a budget for anyone who wants to buy an M2 Mac or equivalent.

For our production stack, anyone can suggest a tool with a brief RFC. We’ll discuss it as a team, then I’ll ultimately make the final call on whether we adopt it or not.

How does the development process work? What's the process for working through bugs, features and tech debt?

We keep the process as lightweight as possible, with a single Kanban board that everyone works from. Our only standing meeting is a weekly demo day where we all share what we built that week—sometimes a huge new feature, sometimes improving reliability of a test suite. Our first priority is fixing bugs that impact our customers, then pushing out new features. We don’t spend much time on cleaning up technical debt, but instead dogfood our own product to enforce consistency and clean things up automatically.

How does code get reviewed, merged, and deployed?

When someone opens pull requests, they get a review from anyone else on the team before it is merged in. Anyone can merge if they have 1 approval and tests pass. The main branch is deployed straight to production.

What is the QA process?

There's no formal QA process but we instead rely on dogfooding and automated tests. We don't really believe in manual QA - our manual QA is us dogfooding the product ourselves a lot. Our testing phase is all automated tests with unit integration tests implemented in the native language test framework. We have integration tests in all of our core workflows.

What are some recent examples of interesting development challenges solved by internal teams as part of building the product?

We're constantly solving relatively interesting problems, mostly around program analysis and machine learning. A fun project we’ve recently been tackling is how to expand our tool to support additional languages by parsing and rewriting ASTs from tree-sitter grammars. This involves understanding how to programmatically transform the AST while preserving correct syntax and intent, while writing code that interoperates between Scala and Rust.

How does on-call work?

We don’t have formalized on-call yet, but instead an #infra-alerts channel in Slack. Whoever sees an issue first jumps on it (usually the founders). When the load becomes higher, we’ll plan to introduce a rotation but this is working fine for our current stage.

Hiring process at Grit

How does the application process work? What are the stages and what is the timeline?

The process is simple, it usually takes two to three weeks to go from the initial interview stage to the offer stage. The application process is divided in following stages:

• Initial 30-minute interview to determine overall fit with the company
• In-depth interview including problem-solving, where you get a chance to solve some problems using our product
• A trial, paid, project where engineers work on a relevant issue for up to 10 hours.

What is the career progression framework? How are promotions and performance reviews managed?

As an early-stage startup, success is not measured by internal promotions, but rather by the success of the company as a whole. Everyone in the company holds significant equity, so the biggest career progression comes from making the company successful—not trying to “advance” within a small organization.

Of course, I have managed teams at Google and do believe in giving regular performance feedback. I provide ongoing feedback every month and reassess roles and responsibilities regularly. Grit should be a place where everyone feels like they’re doing the best work of their lives