Lightstep Wins a Best Place to Work in the Bay Area

We’re excited to announce that we are a winner of the 2019 Bay Area Best Places to Work, an awards program presented the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal.

The winners were selected based on the survey results of thousands of Bay Area workers who assessed their companies on trust in leadership, collaborative culture, benefits and perks, and more.

In short: Wooooooooooo!

So, What Makes Lightstep Different?

There are a lot of things that make Lightstep a unique place to work. If I had to pick, I’d say above all else, our culture, values, and technology set us apart.

It’s hard to define culture in a blog post — it’s something that changes as a company grows. That being said, Lightstep’s culture is built around three key ideas: healthy work/life balance, internal mobility, and a focus on family and team diversity.

Part of our work/life balance comes from the trust we place in our team and each other.

We prioritize independence, and aim to create an environment where everyone can work effectively in their own areas of expertise. Our team is encouraged to work how they want, where they want, and with whatever technology best enables them to do so.

Semi-related: We are really good at baking pies.

We are also really good at eating pies:

Working At Lightstep

We partner with our employees to grow their talents, experiences, and careers — and even define their own roles at the company.

For example, Isobel RedelmeierIsobel Redelmeier shaped her own hybrid role: “I knew I wanted some sort of challenge/change of pace beyond the traditional IC engineer role, but I didn't necessarily know what I wanted that to look like,” she says. “Was it PMing? Speaking more? Something else? The Lightstep leadership seemed genuinely open to finding the right alignment between employee interests and business needs, rather than disincentivizing anything outside of the exact, on-paper job requirements.” This led Isobel to her current role as an open source software engineer where she partakes in a combination of engineering, project management, and community work.

For me personally, diversity played a big role in choosing to join the Lightstep team. When I started, nearly half the IC engineers were women, many of whom were in senior roles. As we have grown, we’ve added team members from diverse backgrounds around the world.

For some employees, our focus on families is a major factor in their decision to join the team. When people think about “startups” rarely do they envision family and community. At Lightstep, family and community are core to our experience.

Many of our events are kid-friendly and organized with families in mind. In fact, last month we invited all of our employees’ families to the office to play with (adorable) pigs!

Lightstep Values

Our values guide our actions, and help us make the right decisions as we continue to grow.

• We should always align our actions towards a common purpose

• Trust is paramount and must be cultivated

• The most valuable team members multiply rather than add

• We shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously

• Building and retaining an inclusive and diverse team is the best way to grow a successful company

We look for team members who are thoughtful above all else, as we strongly believe that EQ > IQEQ > IQ.

To quote our Co-Founder and CEO Ben Sigelman:

“It's not just that we work hard or that we have fun — we live our values. Employees at Lightstep trust each other, help each other, and even when we are tackling major challenges, we try not to take ourselves too seriously.”

Lightstep Technology

We help organizations gain visibility and insights into their distributed systems, whether they are just starting to migrate from a monolith or already have 1,000s of services in a complex, multi-layered microservices architecture.

How do we do this? Well, this could easily be a 10-part list. Here are three areas that stand out to me:

1. Scalability. Our unique Satellite Architecture captures 100% of unsampled transaction data at systems of any size.

2. Automation. By automatically analyzing, aggregating, and visualizing end-to-end distributed tracesdistributed traces, we help teams quickly identify what is causing an issue, and what is not.

3. Simplification. Lightstep’s Service DiagramsService Diagrams offer an interactive, real-time, and dynamic overview of system performance and architecture. Not only do they surface once-hidden dependencies, these visual insights can be shared across teams with a simple click, drastically improving communication during firefighting, post-mortem, or CI/CD pipeline optimization.

Interested In Working at Lightstep?

We are hiring for roles in every department! If you’re in Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product, Design, Customer Success, or Talent — please reach out to our team.

Check out our open positionsCheck out our open positions!