Today, upskilling might be more important than ever.
Workers can expect that between now and 2030, two-fifths of their existing skill set will become out of date.
Engineers are at the frontline of this rapid change, especially as companies continue to integrate AI and automation into their engineering workflows. McKinsey & Company found that over the next three years, 92 percent of companies plan to increase their AI investments. Meanwhile, Wired reported that three in four coders use AI at least once a week. AI is now a common tool that engineering teams use to help ship faster than ever.
Take the team at Academia.edu, for example. Melvyn Sng, staff software engineer, shared how having the freedom to experiment with AI has become an important part of the edtech company’s team culture of professional growth.
“Freedom to experiment matters,” Sng said. “If something feels clunky, I don’t have to wait for permission to improve it. I can try something, see whether it helps and share what I learned.”
AI isn’t the only tool changing the engineering toolbox, however. Upskilling to learn new techniques in data management, cybersecurity and cloud architecture is critical for engineering teams today.
One of the most important upskilling strategies at digital customer experience company Quantum Metric has nothing to do with a specific tool, but has everything to do with the diverse teammates learning to use those tools.
“The most important way our team supports learning for engineers is through diversity,” Alex Miyamura, senior director of software engineering said. “Our team’s diversity of experiences fosters an environment where we can all learn from each other.”
Built In spoke with engineers across industries to hear how their teams create intentional opportunities for professional development and collaborative team cultures that thrive on continuous learning.
Featured Companies
SmartBear provides a portfolio of trusted tools that give software development teams around the world visibility into end-to-end quality through test management and automation, API development lifecycle and application stability.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
Our engineering organization spans a broad portfolio — from API tooling to testing and quality solutions, plus the shared platform and AI services that support it all. What ties these disciplines together is a company culture that values engineers as more than caretakers of a specific codebase. We offer genuine mobility across teams, giving engineers the opportunity to contribute somewhere new when priorities evolve or a new challenge emerges. We’ve built several products from the ground up by pairing engineers who know the domain deeply and want to take on something different with newer teammates eager to bring a fresh perspective. That mix tends to produce something energizing.
Our team is also genuinely global, with engineers across the United States, Ireland, Poland, India and Australia, and that breadth brings real richness to how we work. Collaborating across time zones and cultures sharpens communication, builds perspective and creates relationships that make the work more interesting. We’re a team where your value comes from the skill and judgment you bring, not how long you’ve sat in one seat.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
SmartBear supports growth at every level. As AI started to reshape how software gets built, we didn’t wait for our teams to figure it out on their own. We ran a large-scale program to integrate Claude Code into how we work, from project setup to using it across the full software development lifecycle. That training included companywide sessions with hundreds of attendees down to hands-on sessions tailored to individual scrum teams. Engineers also get a learning and development budget they can point at whatever makes sense for them, no prescribed path required.
Beyond formal programs, we actively develop people into new roles. Engineering managers on our team often started as individual contributors, making the transition with structured mentorship from experienced managers and directors. Senior engineers can step into technical ownership roles, leading large cross-team efforts and growing their leadership presence without necessarily moving into management. Our goal is to meet engineers where they are and give them a real path forward.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
Some of the best skill-building on our team happens when we bring engineers in early on complex problems, working alongside product management to explore the solution space rather than starting from a finished spec. That means running proofs of concept, evaluating options and helping define the direction, the kind of work that builds technical judgment and business fluency at the same time. When new products get greenlit, whether acquired or built from scratch, engineers can raise their hand to be part of them from the ground up. That foundational work is a different challenge than contributing to a mature codebase, and many engineers find it one of the most stretching experiences of their careers.
As AI continues to reshape our industry, we’ve been encouraging engineering leads to drive the conversation about what needs to be built, not just execute against it. That shift from contributor to strategic thought partner is one of the most rewarding challenges we can offer.
EliseAI builds AI agents to automate workflows in the housing and healthcare industries. Its platform handles leasing, resident operations and patient services across voice, email, SMS and chat.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
Working on the engineering team at EliseAI is fast-paced and genuinely mission-driven. We’re building AI that handles real-world conversations like leasing, maintenance and renewals at scale, so the problems are meaty and the impact is immediate. The team is collaborative and relatively flat, which means engineers have a real voice in product and technical decisions. You’re not just executing tickets; you’re helping shape how the product evolves.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
Growth is pretty organic here. You learn a lot just by working on hard problems at the intersection of AI, real-time communication and property management integrations. We also have regular eng talks, mentorship pairing and a strong culture of collaboration where people genuinely invest in teaching and lifting each other up. Because the team is still scaling, there’s room to go deep in an area you’re curious about and become a go-to person for it quickly.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
There’s a wide range. On the AI side, you might work on improving conversation quality, latency or handling edge cases in natural language. On the platform side, there are challenges around CRM/PMS integrations, reliability at scale and multi-channel communication like SMS, email and voice. Engineers also get exposure to product thinking early because features ship quickly and you see user feedback directly. It’s a good place to grow breadth while going deep on something specific.
Quantum Metric helps companies improve their user experience with continuous product design.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
Engineering at Quantum Metric is a breath of fresh air. Instead of churning feature after feature out without our input and against impossible deadlines, engineering and our cross-functional partners at the company work together toward a common goal: improving how our customers use their data to understand their customers and build customer-defined digital products faster.
Stability, performance and extensibility aren’t afterthoughts; they’re first-class citizens that we work with our product and business partners to uphold. When we’re looking to tackle business problems, we’re not brought in at the eleventh hour. We’re on customer calls and work closely with our colleagues and counterparts to craft the right technical solutions.
These solutions aren’t straightforward. They’re genuinely interesting technical problems. I’ve had both interview candidates and customer engineers tell us that what we want to do is impossible within the iOS and Android ecosystems, but we indeed do achieve the impossible on a daily basis.
In short, engineering at Quantum Metric isn’t treated as a cost center like it is in basically every other company. We are critical partners in our collective success.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
The most important way our team supports learning for engineers is through diversity. I can’t think of two individuals on our team who followed the same, cookie-cutter path many picture as the “ideal” in this industry, like going to a top-tier computer science program or working at a “big” tech company.
Our team’s diversity of experiences fosters an environment where we can all learn from each other. When we work on tough problems — and that happens all the time here — we bounce ideas off of each other and the solution we come up with more often than not is quite different from each team member’s original proposal.
Having individuals who worked on mission-critical systems and quality engineering, individuals who worked at small scrappy startups and individuals who worked at big tech companies lets us all teach each other what we learned in our prior lives and come up with novel solutions that balance the multitude of constraints we all have to as engineers.
In our team discussions, I always hear, “I never would have thought about that” — but now all of us will think about that, and we all have grown and learnt from our collective experiences and perspectives.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
Usually when we think of engineers building new skills, we think about learning a new language, framework or tool. The fact of the matter is that professional growth for an engineer should be multi-faceted and well-rounded. That’s what differentiates us and gives us a competitive advantage throughout our careers. Learning a new language, framework or tool? That’s just table stakes.
At Quantum Metric, engineers wear many different hats and no day is the same. We solve deeply interesting engineering problems that require reverse engineering how operating systems and frameworks work. We support a multitude of app architectures across every operating system version and device our customers support. We manage complex cross-functional projects that move the needle for the company. We work closely with account teams and customers to help them build cultures maniacally focused on winning the hearts of their customers.
Roles where you can start your day disassembling compiled software to figure out an esoteric bug and end your day working with senior leaders at Fortune 100 companies are few and far between, but we’re lucky enough to have those opportunities to take us to the next level.
Lowe’s offers a suite of home improvement products and services for both professionals and consumers.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
Engineering at Lowe’s is collaborative, fast-paced and incredibly impactful. Everyone has a voice and the best ideas come from open technical discussions regardless of title.
I lead engineering within our “enterprise cart and checkout” organization. Every purchase our customers and associates make flows through the platforms we build, so every feature, performance improvement and reliability enhancement has a direct impact on the customer experience and the business.
What makes our team unique is that we combine the scale of a Fortune 100 company with a startup mindset. Engineers are empowered to innovate, explore new technologies and help shape technical decisions while building solutions that millions of customers rely on every day.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
Learning is part of our engineering culture. Every week, we host an engineering connect where team members share new technologies, demo proofs of concept, discuss architecture and solve complex technical challenges together.
We also invest in growth through mentorship, pair programming, internal learning and development programs, external conferences and knowledge-sharing with engineers from across the company. We celebrate technical excellence, provide visibility for great work and actively support career growth and promotions.
AI is another exciting area of focus. Our engineers are building AI-powered agents that improve developer productivity and create smarter experiences for our customers, giving the team hands-on experience with technologies that are shaping the future of engineering.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
“Cart and checkout” is a critical part of the customer experience at Lowe’s, giving engineers the opportunity to solve complex distributed systems challenges at enterprise scale.
Beyond building customer-facing features, our engineers own the full software lifecycle — from architecture and cloud-native development to CI/CD, observability, platform engineering and production operations. That broad ownership accelerates technical growth and builds strong problem-solving skills.
Engineers also have the freedom to explore new technologies, contribute to AI initiatives and improve the developer experience through automation and intelligent tooling. It’s an environment where you’re constantly learning, solving meaningful problems and seeing the impact of your work every day.
Onebrief is a software company for military planning.
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.
PEAK6 is an investment firm that works across industries, from finance and insurance to esports and education.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
Being a member of CapMan engineering is equal parts rewarding and challenging, but I’ve always received an ample amount of mentorship and guidance to prepare me for the challenges. Amongst the members of the engineering organization is a wonderful blend of curiosity, stewardship and collective drive to get better each day; many of my closest friends, role models and mentors have come from within the engineering organization. Everyone finds time to fit your development into their schedule, and before you know it (or feel like you’re ready) it’s your turn to leave your mark on the organization. The problems that CapMan engineering solve are extremely dynamic and require lots of business context and resilience, which I thoroughly enjoy. No one is off in their own corner, isolated from the larger problem. Being an “individual contributor” is still possible, but you need to be ready to communicate clearly and execute efficiently.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
There are more opportunities to learn and grow than you can shake a stick at. The engineering organization regularly hosts knowledge-sharing sessions, sponsors engineers to attend conferences and holds “hackdays.” In your day-to-day role, you learn by doing. You are consistently asked to solve difficult problems where there aren’t right answers, which gives people ownership early in their tenures. I think this ownership has a ton of great benefits. It helps you grow across all areas of the stack, usually split up into separate roles at other companies. It makes you a strong communicator and helps you understand value in the eyes of a stakeholder.
In the way of agentic engineering, CapMan has adopted AI throughout the software development lifecycle and encourages members to experiment and share their findings. Nobody is expecting engineers to instantly become ten times more productive.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
One example of a project that furthered my development was the first time I got to become a “tech champion,” which is a short-lived tech lead role. After having been a member of our execution algorithms team for just over a year, I was asked to rearchitect one of our most used algorithms. This process included everything from writing the architectural decision documents, to leading several senior engineers through implementation, to deploying and monitoring performance. Instead of simply being prescribed a ticket, I got the unique opportunity to ask the “why” questions instead of the “how” questions. It’s opportunities like these that help CapMan engineers grow up fast and build new, invaluable skills.
Zscaler is an information technology and cybersecurity company that is distributed across more than 160 data centers globally. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform combined with advanced AI combats billions of cyber threats and policy violations every day and unlocks productivity gains for modern enterprises by reducing costs and complexity.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
Working on the engineering team at Zscaler has been transformative. I joined the company as an intern and was immediately immersed in high-impact work; not side projects, but core infrastructure that serves millions of global users. At Zscaler, engineering goes far beyond writing code; I’m encouraged to understand our customers’ perspectives and collaborate fluidly across our global, cross-functional teams. What truly sets our culture apart is how intentionally we invest in human connection. Our monthly outdoor team lunches create space for genuine conversations that strengthen our relationships, building the foundation of trust that makes our technical collaboration so effective. Everyone, from senior architects to new engineers, is approachable and invested in each other’s success. It’s an environment where your contributions are highly visible and meaningful from day one.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
Some of my best learning has happened from being curious, like asking an architect a quick question that turned into a 30-minute whiteboard session or going through a code review where a peer took the time to explain not just what to fix, but why it mattered. That’s how this team operates. There’s no gatekeeping of knowledge; people are genuinely excited to share what they know. My growth is also supported through the autonomy I’m given to lean into the specific areas that genuinely excite me; that passion is reflected across the team. Zscaler also offers ZSource, an internal learning platform that keeps me plugged into emerging tech and AI trends. Ultimately, my growth here has not just been technical; collaborating closely with customers and cross-functional teams across global time zones has made me a much more complete engineer.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
One of the most growth-accelerating challenges here is diving into our codebase. It’s a large, mature codebase handling real network security at massive scale, which can feel humbling at first. But that’s exactly where the growth happens. I’ve worked on high-stakes areas like firewall layers and our intrusion prevention system where a bug can affect real users in production, which raises your standards fast. What surprised me most was how much of the skill-building happened around the code. Coordinating with teammates across time zones taught me to communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely. Getting exposed to how customers experience the product that I developed changed how I think about trade-offs. Collaborating on end-to-end problems gave me a systems-level perspective I couldn’t have gotten any other way. Every project here stretches you in new directions.
Academia.edu is a platform for researchers and scholars to share their work, discover research and connect with fellow academics globally.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
I work on a lean team of five engineers building Academia.edu’s AI co-scientist. It’s pretty fast-paced. We launch new experiments almost every week, look at how people actually use them and adjust from there.
Because the product is still new, most of our useful learning comes from building something quickly and getting it in front of real users — not discussing it for hours in a meeting room. The team has a lot of autonomy. If someone has an idea, they can usually make a rough version, share it with the team and test whether it’s actually useful.
Our backend is a Ruby on Rails monolith, but the product now spans the web, browser extensions and desktop apps. AI coding tools have made it more practical for a small team like ours to work across that range. We’re less restricted by the technologies we already know, so we can choose what makes sense for the user instead of forcing everything into our existing stack.
The tradeoff is that not every experiment works. Actually, a lot of them don’t. But we try not to get too attached to something just because we spent time building it. The goal is to learn quickly and use that learning to decide what to do next.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
We have a high-challenge, high-support feedback culture. That depends a lot on trust. It means having a difficult conversation when something isn’t working but also making sure we have the support we need to improve.
Our learning happens through experimentation. Everyone is free to try different AI tools and workflows and we regularly share what worked and what didn’t. It’s informal and practical. Someone might show how they used a tool to understand an unfamiliar codebase, work through a product idea or build something outside their usual technical background.
Freedom to experiment matters. If something feels clunky, I don’t have to wait for permission to improve it. I can try something, see whether it helps and share what I learned. I use Claude as a thinking partner to talk through an idea, which helps me find the gaps.
I stay current through podcasts like “Lenny’s Podcast” and our internal AI Slack channels, where we share tools, articles and examples from across the industry. Working on our co-scientist feature gives our team a practical reason to stay current. Part of our job is figuring out which new ideas are genuinely useful to researchers and which ones are mostly hype.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
Our team mainly comes from Ruby and web application development, but we’ve built a desktop application, a browser extension and parts of our product in Python. AI coding tools don’t remove the need to understand what we’re building; rather, they make it easier to get started in an unfamiliar area and learn by doing.
Engineers also get to own work across the full product moving between back-end code, a desktop client, infrastructure and the user experience in the same project. It can be uncomfortable because there isn’t always an expert nearby with the answer, but that’s where a lot of the learning happens.
We experiment a lot, but everything we build should eventually make contact with a real user. If the response isn’t positive, which happens more often than we’d like, we try not to defend the work because of the time we already spent on it. We look at what we learned, decide whether the idea needs another iteration and move on when it doesn’t.
That combination of broad ownership and direct user feedback has been the biggest source of growth for me. You’re learning a new technology and also learning when it’s useful, where it breaks down and whether it solves a problem anyone really has.
OneImaging is a comprehensive radiology network, reducing the cost of medical imaging by as much as 80 percent.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?
Fast-moving, high-ownership and genuinely mission-driven. We’re rebuilding how people access diagnostic imaging, so engineers aren’t shipping abstract features with low utilization — they’re removing real friction from a patient’s healthcare journey, which keeps the work grounded and motivating.
Our culture rests on first-principles thinking, relentless ownership and a healthy disrespect for convention. We challenge assumptions constantly — asking, “why does this step exist at all” — while never compromising on compliance or data integrity.
Every meaningful part of the system has one clear owner, so engineers make architecture calls and propose simplifications without waiting on sign-off at every turn.
We organize around small, domain-focused teams that own their work end to end: from understanding the problem to shipping and operating the solution. Boundaries create focus, not silos — everyone keeps general awareness across engineering, and timely code reviews are treated as core work. We’ve matured from scrappy startup into a structured organization built to scale, without losing the own-it feel of a small team.
How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?
We have an explicit career framework spanning both an individual-contributor track and a management track, with defined levels, competencies and promotion criteria. It’s a guide for growth, not just a yardstick — every level requires demonstrating continuous learning, and our job as leaders is to align each engineer’s interests with the work in front of them.
Growth is built into the cadence of OneImaging engineering’s day to day, not saved for an annual review. Managers identify two to three growth areas with each engineer in regular one-on-ones and develop people by delegating meaningful, stretch-projects, along with direct feedback. We also have a conference and certification budget and encourage our engineers to level up.
What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?
Almost everything we’re building right now centers on one question: How can OneImaging create the best diagnostic imaging booking experience in the world? That framing gives engineers ambitious, open-ended problems to grow into.
One example is “voice AI” that calls imaging centers to find real-time availability, so members never have to pick up the phone themselves. Engineers work at the edge of conversational AI, telephony and deterministic business logic.
Another is automating the interoperability of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine images from imaging centers into our own DICOM vault, eliminating manual CD-ROM and portal handoffs. That’s deep systems work with medical imaging standards, high-volume data pipelines and strict compliance all in one.
We’re also experimenting with computer vision that can read DICOM images and act as an invaluable companion along a member’s healthcare journey — multi-model orchestration and evaluation where correctness genuinely matters. These projects push engineers across AI, distributed systems and a complex clinical domain, and our capacity model protects room to build durable systems rather than fight perpetual fires.
