An outstanding company in every respect - Engineering Lead Rent The Runway Employee Review

5.0
Jan 31, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits: * Solid salary * 401k with solid company match * Flexible, generous vacation * Unlimited parental leave * No hesitance to sponsor visas for our outstanding team. * We're in NYC! Company Culture: * We have 10 core values and they're not just corporate BS. We truly refer to them on a daily basis. We have multiple mechanisms supporting this: For instance, we can nominate coworkers for "Core Value Awards" which puts them in a pool for an awesome vacation to anywhere they choose! And another system lets us give micro-rewards linked to the core values - every day - that can be redeemed for things like Amazon gift cards or charitable donations. * We do not tie compensation to company or individual goals! Rather we trust everyone to work hard, and compensate them appropriately! * We have an company Ski Trip every year! * And a Beach Day! * And a Field Day (softball)! * We celebrate and promote women! The co-founders, CEO, COO, CFO and something like 70% of the employees are women! And the co-founders are so serious about supporting women entrepreneurs that they started a spin-off non-profit called the RTR Foundation to help incubate female-founded companies! * An example to illustrate how awesome CEO Jenn Hyman is: After the results of the 2016 presidential election, Jenn held a lunch, open to everyone, to talk openly about how we were all feeling about the results. This sort of thing takes a brave, bold leader and reflects our company culture. Engineering Culture: * We're at about 30% women on the Engineering team and working hard to push that number higher! In the last few months about 50% of new engineering hires have been women. * Drinks & Demos: Every week the engineering team gets together and whoever wants to gets up and talks about cool tech they're discovered or features they've implemented or cultural things. More importantly, we invite friends and potential candidates as a way to show them our culture and meet the team. * Ask forgiveness not permission. Basically: we're trusted and empowered to push for what we believe in! * Break Into Code: Our engineering team seeks out folks who are looking to break into careers in software, especially underrepresented folks, and offers guidance. * We're not shy about sharing things publicly. We have some open source, and transparency is important to us so we've shared things like our career ladder and our tech stack, and more on the way. * We don't burn the midnight oil. That's just stupid. We believe in work/life balance. Enjoy your friends and family and New York City and come back to work refreshed! Technology: * RTR is _way_ more of a tech company than many people realize at first! We've been (accurately) called "a fashion company with a technology soul." * We've build all the software that handles... * Our unique "reverse logistics" system: Companies like Amazon are experts at what is called "pick, pack and ship" - finding what the customer ordered, getting it and shipping it out as quickly/efficiently as possible. RTR does that but since we're renting, virtually everything returns to us! So we also expert at getting the dresses back, dry cleaning them, filing them away on racks, etc. In fact, ~50% of what comes in on a given day goes right back out to the next customer _the_ _same_ _day_! We call this cross-docking! And we wrote all the software that handles this. We track every item by barcode everywhere it goes in the warehouse! * Plus we wrote the whole website... * All the Java services behind the scenes... * The iOS app, which has frequently been featured by Apple since it's inception. * The software that runs our retail stores... * And various internal tools...

Cons

As with any company there have been some ups and downs over the years (I've been here 3.5). It hurt when we lost our extremely popular CTO, for instance, and there was some bleeding of talent afterward, but we have recovered to an extent I didn't believe would be possible. We have an outstanding new CTO, we've not only stemmed the flow of talent but turned on engineering hiring in a big big way. Things are easily as good now as they've ever been at RTR.

Explore other reviews about Rent The Runway

5.0
Sep 7, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Employee discount, remote work from home

Cons

Customer Experience agents have little to no decision making power and are not empowered to do anything behind using pre-scripted responses to common customer queries. Most were part-time

3.0
Mar 24, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Overall, it's a decent place to get some good experience. You have the opportunity to work on some great projects that move the needle and flex your skills.

Cons

That said, you will need to be VERY on top of your work and always look for creative ways to work/solve problems. The company is not willing to pay for any new tools due to keeping budgets tight (which we can see after this cycle or layoffs), trying to get profitable, and it's heavily impacting the work culture and the customer experience. There is very little culture, and I found it quite hard to connect with the team, but it could also be that everyone on the team has been there for 3 years+. The product and processes are not straightforward. It will take you a little bit to acclimate, but leadership will not really care and often likes to press you for metrics, projects, and quantified performance.

2
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