Pros
Zipari is a very specific type of start up and is not for everyone. The product offering is suite of applications that they sell to (large-ish) health insurance companies that are looking to modernize their digital experience to remain competitive and stay with-the-times. More tangibly, at the moment their bread and butter products are forms and interfaces for: - Brokers to sell health insurance - Companies (think an org's HR team) to manage a policy - Members to buy health insurance (think open enrollment) There's a ton more on the roadmap and being talked about, but things move very very slowly at Zipari so I'd wager anything beyond this is quite a ways out. The company is quite successful. Leadership is very transparent about the healthy numbers around acquiring new customers and the bottom line. This is 'felt' by the nice office/location, quite competitive compensation, and welcomed perks.
Cons
I would not recommend Zipari to any engineer who seeks passion/pride in their work, and I don't mean that in a snarky way. Zipari is fine establishment for any engineer looking to clock-in and clock-out and have the opportunity to perform digital janitorial work. I definitely wouldn't recommend Zipari to a software engineer looking to do product development. There is very little sense of ownership, and little to no opportunity to take initiative and drive/improve features and the platform. This is in part because the features and product-behaviors are almost always dictated by the client, so engineers are all to often puppets on strings. If you are accustomed to having a voice and taking the time to mature and develop a platform, you will be quite disappointed. Other Misc. Issues: - Office politics are rampant and conflict is commonplace. People are often at each others' necks and are set on undermining each other. - Poor leadership. A lot of people who have been with the company for a while have risen to mgmt positions mostly in part due to their tenure. It's a shame because a lot of them are talented, but are so obviously fish-out-of-water when it comes to leading their teams. - Project and Product managers are often technically illiterate and are simply warm bodies hardwired to move tickets. This is a huge pain point for engineers as people tasked with setting the pace of software development have absolutely no baseline understanding of the components of software development. For example, some PMs couldn't tell you the difference between backend and frontend. - Poor work/life balance. Having to work on the weekend isn't uncommon. If you go on PTO, you'll likely be "asked" to bring your computer with you. - Massive technical debt and very unhealthy codebase. There isn't a culture of contributing quality code. Pull requests are typically open for mere seconds before being merged, typically without any peer review. In addition tests are an afterthought. It's a mess. - Every team seems to be out of step with the other. The left hand never seems to know what the right is doing. With the proper leadership, I think the teams could be in better harmony and far more productive. - It's hard to contribute. Depending on what team you're on, writing code might be a rarity. You'll get caught up with issues in scattered environments, fixing configuration/env-vars, and just in general will spin your wheels