Serious Technical Culture - Junior Software Engineer Vaticle Employee Review

Vaticle is a very personable company where the top officers are interested and involved in the success of both their company and the community around them. Building a community of users and technical experts around graph analytics has always been at the core of this company and I expect it will continue to be. Currently, I work as a Data Science Contractor for Vaticle doing custom graph database buildouts for top-tier clients. I think my experience with Vaticle is best demonstrated by a brief story of how I started working with Vaticle and how the relationship has grown. I first met the co-founders Haikal Pribadi (CEO) and Tomás Sabat (COO) at Graph Day 2017. After recognizing a common passion for data encoded in graphs we embarked on collaborative work analyzing PubMed medical literature. Since that time our relationship has grown and they have contracted my group to do a number of buildouts in a variety of domains including bioinformatics food science and cyber security. These buildouts have not only been a source of revenue but also an opportunity for my group to contribute and practice applying graph algorithms in bioinformatics, my domain of expertise. Working with Vaticle has contributed substantially to my growth as a Data Scientist and the growth of my company. They are always available to help and they know their business.

There are very few cons. The only issue I see is that Vaticle is a small startup. This is both a pro and a con, depending on the goals and personality of each employee. Workers need to be flexible, wear many hats, and understand the business thoroughly in order to contribute optimally. Having said that, the company is growing and I expect that it will take on more of the structured aspects of a larger company as it grows.

- An engineering-first company, code quality is prized highly to reduce compounding problems down the line. - Deadlines are flexible in favour of following the technically better path. - Naturally the two above points entail a longer-term strategy for the growth of the product. - Meaningful work. TypeDB is used in a wide range of critical industries, with many users from life sciences in particular. Often the use-cases have very meaningful motives with effects that will be seen in the real world in the coming years. - Strong community movement and events keep engineers connected to the impact of their work. - Employees have a strong sense of ownership over their products, and are given the mandate to follow their noses to engineer the right way, not the get-it-done hacky way. - Will not settle for anyone but high-achievers who mesh well with the culture Haikal has gone to great lengths to define. This certainly means the team is cohesive and you can trust your team members to come up with the goods. - The company has matured a lot over the period I have been employed for, and has learned the profile of employees that will thrive in this environment. - The leadership should maintain the existing culture of pursuing non-hacky code as this is probably the defining feature of engineering at Vaticle, which brings employees great satisfaction.

- Technical prioritisation and relationship with deadlines could be improved. - Self-taught learning required, but not enough resources for consistent mentoring to support this.