Pros
Working at Metromile has been a revelation for me. I’ve been here 6 months at this stage and have never been happier from a professional point of view - the work is challenging, and the teams are creative and dedicated. The exec team is aligned on company direction and the future looks great. We get regular updates from them and they have been progressive in their response to concerns about diversity and inclusion where we are instigating ideas proposed by staff that will lead to change and improvement. Within engineering and data science we maintain a balance between longer term research activities, model iteration & improvements, data engineering challenges, infrastructure maintenance and tech-debt. Company culture is decent. Compared with previous places I’ve worked the group is a lot more social. There is a lunch time jogging group, a monthly pot-luck group, a book-club and movie-club.
Cons
I mentioned tech debt above but even this is less than my experience at previous larger companies. We have the usual start-up growing pains as well as some culture clashes in terms of approach in different functions of the company. There is a lot of passion and lots of work to do, which we can make great progress on with trust and focus.