Great place to work, have a say in the workplace, no BS - Senior Data Engineer Upstart Employee Review

5.0
Apr 11, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- It might be easy to roll your eyes when people from Upstart say how open their culture is, but it's true; it's more open than any other place I've worked at (in the last 13 years). At a company wide-level, financial success & distress, public incidents, important non-public business metrics are all openly discussed. You can ask questions about them and anything else (yes, nothing is Off-Limit!) directly to the founders, CEO, CTO directly at the weekly Q&A. - One great thing about Upstart, in contrast to other comparable lending companies, is how we have a pretty singular focus "to help people achieve Financial Fitness". This sentiment echoes across the board...where we count our success "by not the number of loans originated BUT by the number of people we have helped attain financial fitness " - Highest rating on Credit Karma and great reviews and feedback from the folks we have helped. I read back to myself, a new feedback everyday which makes my belief in our mission more stronger!! - I own and have a the say in my engineering department which makes this a perfect place to work for me. Opportunities to grow and contribute are endless here and all you need is commitment, ownership and skill to have it....no BS or work-politics here! - Finally, my yet another favorite: if you aspire to work on the latest and the greatest bleeding edge technology then this is where you got to be! I have been working on the newest cloud based technology stuff (IaaS, PaaS)...which is a great career development - Great tech budget, fully stocked kitchen, meal reimbursement, no cap on vacations

Cons

- Need more company outings and social gatherings

Explore other reviews about Upstart

5.0
Jun 11, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Promising product, competitive pay, lots of work

Cons

Unstable, leadership is hit or miss

2.0
Jun 10, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Compensation. Only reason I don't give them 1 star. - Remote Work - Pretty diverse

Cons

- incredible amount of politics, process, and red tape for an engineering org on the smaller side - Chaos. There were three re-orgs between Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. Actual madness. - High turnover is embraced. They will gladly let go of long time high performers with years of tribal knowledge and hire someone new with more experience. You eventually up with a team where everyone has hardly any domain knowledge. - Fear driven environment. You will hear performance mentioned every week in company comms and how they want everyone to be X% more productive with AI. - Speaking of AI usage, they take it to the next level. Slack messages, Jira tickets, code, design documents. All made with AI. It will be the most overly verbose word slop you can think of and you'll get a pat on the back for being so thorough. My manager seriously told me how she just copied a technical design doc into chatgpt and read that. Wild. - Cutthroat. With the new focus on productivity gains and measuring performance with PR volume, LOC, and token usage, people hardly review PRs anymore because it gets them nothing. Be prepared to spend lots of time begging your team and other teams for reviews and then waiting. Unless you are good at playing politics and have the time / energy for it, I would avoid this place at all costs. If you are just looking for something short term that pays well and encourages you to use AI for any and everything, this place works well, just don't expect to stick around for long as you're considered a veteran at 2 years with all the turnover they have. I'm glad I left for something else when I did because I see on linkedin they've had more layoffs since.

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