Onebrief Career Growth & Development

What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?

In a word, challenging. We’re building a collaborative, real-time planning platform that has to hold up under the hardest conditions imaginable, and the technical bar that comes with that is high. During large exercises, hundreds of planners work the same scenario at once and push the system to its limits. That kind of pressure surfaces hard problems in real time, and solving them well is a big part of what makes the work rewarding.

What keeps the work interesting is the balance between solving immediate customer problems and investing in the platform’s long-term evolution. One week, you might be rethinking our core architecture to make the platform more plug-and-play so we can launch faster. Next, you’re shipping something a customer is waiting on, like AI assist. There’s real forward-looking engineering here, not just feature delivery.

What holds it together is the group. It’s a genuinely supportive set of engineers focused on building the best product we can. It never feels political or ego-driven. Good ideas get taken seriously regardless of who they come from, and that’s a big reason the hard problems stay fun to solve.

How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?

A big part of how engineers grow here is by learning from each other. With how fast technology is changing, it’s impossible to stay ahead on your own, and the culture here leans hard on peers helping peers. Whether it’s someone sharing a new technology or jumping in to help when someone’s stuck, that kind of collaboration happens every day.

We also make time to learn together. We run weekly sharing sessions and the occasional hackathon. One recent session was all about how each of us uses AI in our day-to-day development and how to do it in a way that actually makes us better engineers. The focus is on using new technologies thoughtfully while keeping humans firmly in the loop.

The other thing that makes growth here different is who you get to learn from. Beyond engineering, we work alongside former military planners whose firsthand experience gives everyone building the product a much deeper understanding of the problems we’re solving.

What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?

Building a collaborative, real-time system that has to work under military conditions leaves enormous room to grow. Our platform has to stay live and performant even in “denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited” connectivity environments, and syncing a shared operational picture across many echelons under those constraints is genuinely hard engineering. 

A lot of what we work on doesn’t have a reference implementation to copy. We’re building for a problem space that hasn’t really existed before, so engineers are encouraged to develop novel approaches instead of reaching for familiar patterns. You end up developing skills and instincts you couldn’t build anywhere else, simply because the problems themselves are new.

Our squad model is a big part of how that growth happens. When engineers move between squads, they get a real say in where they go and that isn’t always where they’re already strongest. Often, it’s where they most want to grow. One of our front-end-focused engineers saw a gap in our real-time sync engine, flexed into it and ultimately became the go-to expert for that whole system. That’s the kind of ownership that helps engineers grow.