The key to effective engineering isn’t just speed — it’s quality.
Just ask the team at Ursa Major, a company that designs and manufactures propulsion systems for space, hypersonic applications and missile systems. According to Manager of Hadley Engineering Erin Hadlin, every engineer takes “extreme ownership” of what they do every day, which consists of tackling unique problems and thinking outside of the box — all while maintaining strong alignment.
“The first and most critical thing is that the team must be in lockstep with each other, so there’s a level of tight decision-making,” Hadlin said. “We have to make sure that we’re all on the same page as we do those things, and then once again, always questioning why we’re doing something.”
Senior AI Engineering Manager Diana Liang and her fellow engineers operate in a similar way at Chamberlain Group, which develops software solutions that provide safe, secure access to homes, communities, workplaces and businesses. As her team takes ownership of the model services and AI foundations behind the company’s products, they ship in small increments to identity issues early on and, most importantly, take a proactive approach to security in the development process.
“Security is part of the design from the start, and for the services customers depend on most, we set clear reliability targets so we know when to slow down and when we can move faster,” Liang said.
Read on to learn more about how the engineering teams at Ursa Major, Chamberlain Group and four other companies move fast without compromising quality.
Featured Companies
Ahold Delhaize USA, a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, is part of the U.S. family of brands, which also includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands: Food Lion, The GIANT Company, Giant Food, Hannaford and Stop & Shop.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at Ahold Delhaize USA?
On the engineering team at Ahold Delhaize USA, customers are our top priority. We build technology solutions that strengthen in-store and online shopping experiences for our grocery store customers. We approach real-world problems from the customer’s perspective and work closely with business, product, architecture and data teams to deliver reliable, secure and scalable solutions that support daily operations. Before making code changes, our engineers conduct technical design reviews and thoroughly review requirements to understand the potential benefits and impacts for customers and the business. We clarify details with business and product teams, map the affected workflows and identify additional scenarios to address. With millions of customers using the technology we deliver, that collaboration matters. Software engineers, security operations, DevOps, site reliability engineers and quality engineers work together to help each change deliver value and a better experience for customers and the business. We embrace technology and innovation to help bring fresh, healthy food to customers’ tables.
“Before making code changes, our engineers conduct technical design reviews and thoroughly review requirements to understand the potential benefits and impacts for customers and the business.”
How does your team move quickly while maintaining quality, reliability or security?
My team focuses on digital shopping experiences across our mobile and web apps, from adding products to the cart through checkout, payment processing and fulfillment communications. Because changes to these services matter to customers and the business, we use DevOps Research and Assessment metrics to balance delivery, speed and quality. We continually strengthen our continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines with automated quality gates, testing and security scanning. We also build observability into our services through logging, monitoring and alerting to help teams identify root causes, and detect and resolve issues before they affect customers or store associates. Software engineering teams collaborate with quality, site reliability and performance engineering teams to support secure, reliable and scalable releases. We also conduct post-incident reviews and regularly review business, customer care and engineering metrics to identify lessons and opportunities to improve. Together, these practices help us deliver with speed and quality while supporting the customer shopping experience.
What should candidates know about the engineering practices or team norms that support agility?
We empower our engineers to own outcomes and customer experiences, not just code. That means understanding business goals and metrics, customer feedback, modern user experience flows and omnichannel shopping journeys. We encourage engineers to speak up during sprint planning, refinement and retrospectives, sharing ideas for turning business requirements into achievable tasks and prioritizing work along the critical path to delivery. We also encourage them to challenge the status quo, both to improve customer experiences and to modernize our engineering foundation and services. We believe teams closest to the customer, the business and the technology are best positioned to make informed decisions and design solutions that deliver mission-critical services with speed, quality and innovation.
Ursa Major designs and manufactures propulsion systems for space, hypersonic applications and missile systems.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at Ursa Major?
Working in engineering at the company is fast, creative and impactful. Every person has such extreme ownership in what they do day to day. We constantly question why we do things, how we do them, and what it means for the end product. Every day is different, and every problem is different, and so it’s really about cultivating an area of out-of-the-box thinking and really creative strategies to figure out how to do things better, faster and more efficiently each day. Our team designs, assembles, builds and tests all onsite at our Berthoud campus, allowing for an extremely fast, iterative approach to engineering.
“Every person has such extreme ownership in what they do day to day.”
How does your team move quickly while maintaining quality, reliability or security?
The first and most critical thing is that the team must be in lockstep with each other, so there’s a level of tight decision-making. We have to make sure that we’re all on the same page as we do those things, and then once again, always questioning why we’re doing something. It is imperative that we make sure we always have the end goal in mind, that we’re always driving to perfect the end product, and that we truly understand how everything works and what it’s going to do. Our decision-making is very tailored to how we go about attacking those problems, and every person is accountable for their commitments. If you say you’re going to do it, then you do it. Everyone really digs in deep and makes sure that they are driving to that end goal together as a unit.
What should candidates know about the engineering practices or team norms that support agility?
We always keep our eyes toward understanding how to improve. This could be chasing repeatability, capability or reliability. Every person should take what we do and add a touch of “better” to it. We have adopted industry standards and challenged them successfully at times, sometimes to find the line between where “good” meets “excellent,” and we’re constantly keeping an eye on the whole picture. Perfection doesn’t matter if it’s too expensive, and a schedule doesn’t matter if the product doesn’t work. We just really lean into it to discover where the best “lives” within each individual component of our engines.
Chamberlain Group develops intuitive software solutions that are designed to provide safe, secure access to homes, communities, workplaces and businesses.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at Chamberlain Group?
Chamberlain Group is more than a garage door opener company. We’re an access company, and our engineers build the myQ platform that helps families monitor and secure their homes. Our team owns the model services and AI foundations behind those experiences, so the work is hands-on, fast-paced and reaches millions of households directly. We’re about 25 people across mobile, middleware, AI and ML development, and quality engineering, working across U.S. time zones, Europe and India. We’re open to the latest technologies, so there’s always something new to learn, and the work rarely gets boring.
How does your team move quickly while maintaining quality, reliability or security?
Speed and quality aren’t a trade-off for us. We use AI tools to speed up development, with checks built into every step so quality is gated throughout. Shared components and standard pipelines mean teams don’t rebuild the same things, and what one team learns benefits the rest. We ship in small increments, which catches issues early and makes rollbacks simple. Security is part of the design from the start, and for the services customers depend on most, we set clear reliability targets so we know when to slow down and when we can move faster.
“We ship in small increments, which catches issues early and makes rollbacks simple.”
What should candidates know about the engineering practices or team norms that support agility?
Candidates should expect a team that values ownership and innovation. We write down decisions so context isn’t locked in individuals’ heads, and we raise concerns early rather than working around them. The team is passionate about learning from each other, and that spirit shows up in everything from code reviews to design discussions. We’re also comfortable experimenting with new tools, so the people who thrive here tend to be curious, hands-on and happy to learn something new every few months.
Huntress’ cybersecurity platform enables organizations to employ endpoint detection and response, protect Microsoft 365 environments and employee identities, offer security awareness training and more.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at Huntress?
I’d describe engineering at Huntress as a mission-driven, high-ownership environment. We work on technically challenging security products across a range of domains, and engineers are expected to own more than just the code. We’re involved in design, testing, observability and product outcomes. It’s collaborative and fast-moving, so you need to be comfortable with ambiguity and working across teams.
“We work on technically challenging security products across a range of domains, and engineers are expected to own more than just the code.”
I don’t say “mission-driven” lightly. I’ve worked at many companies with some version of that value, but Huntress is the first where I’ve seen it consistently applied in a way that didn’t make me roll my eyes. We call our customers partners because we’re not just a vendor to them. The clearest example is how the whole company rallies around widespread security events. Engineering, research, support, account management, the SOC, sales, marketing, legal and others come together at a moment’s notice. It’s pretty amazing and inspiring to see. The people here genuinely care.
How does your team move quickly while maintaining quality, reliability or security?
We don’t treat speed and quality as opposing goals. There’s nothing particularly novel about our approach. The key is consistently applying good engineering practices to reduce the blast radius of changes and shorten feedback loops. We build in observability and use runtime controls like feature flags to ship dark, roll out incrementally or quickly disable a change.
Our AI adoption is a good example. We’ve embraced it to accelerate development, but with guardrails. AI code reviews catch issues humans might miss, while deterministic checks give coding agents early feedback before code reaches a human reviewer. Generated code doesn’t get a free pass: Engineers still own it, and our expectations for human review, testing and production validation haven’t changed. We want better code entering review so those cycles are shorter, not to skip review altogether. Since adopting AI, we’ve seen a two- to four-times increase in shipped code with no change in our incident or defect rates. That’s the important part: moving faster without lowering the quality bar.
What should candidates know about the engineering practices or team norms that support agility?
We’re pragmatic about engineering. Our work should ultimately help us protect more businesses, and we use data to guide decisions rather than chasing new technology just because it’s interesting. We lean on shared conventions and familiar patterns so we can spend our time solving problems rather than reinventing approaches. We’re open to doing things differently, but “it’s newer” isn’t much of a reason on its own.
Our philosophy is “make it work, make it fast, make it cheap.” First, does the solution actually deliver the result we’re after? It’s OK for an approach to fail, but we want to find that out early and learn something useful. Optimizing something that doesn’t move the needle is wasted effort. Once we know we’re solving the right problem, we use data to decide where performance or cost improvements matter. That doesn’t mean putting quality or security off until later. Candidates should be comfortable making small changes, measuring the results and adjusting based on what they learn.
Crexi’s software is designed to help real estate professionals more effectively market, analyze and trade commercial property.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at Crexi?
Crexi engineers build software for commercial real estate, one of the largest asset classes in the world. Commercial real estate has plenty of hard problems: The data is messy, transactions are complicated and the market wants smarter tools than it has. That’s a big part of why we like working on it.
We’re all in on AI. Engineers here build AI-native products, from intelligent search to agentic systems that run on our proprietary data. We even expect candidates to use AI in our interviews, because that’s how we work.
We move fast, and we have a saying for it: Heroes win sprints, teams win quarters. AI makes every engineer faster. We care just as much about turning that speed into team momentum, which takes shared ownership and real collaboration between people who make each other better. If you want to work with smart, generous people on problems that matter, and see your work ship and move an entire industry, you’ll like it here.
“If you want to work with smart, generous people on problems that matter, and see your work ship and move an entire industry, you’ll like it here.”
How does your team move quickly while maintaining quality, reliability or security?
At Crexi, we think of guardrails the way you’d think of them on a highway: They’re what give you the confidence to hit the gas.
That starts with how code gets written. Our engineers and their AI tools work from the same shared standards, rules and skills, so the right pattern is usually the easiest one to reach for, starting with the first line. Every pull request is tested, reviewed and checked against those standards before it merges. We catch problems early, while they’re cheap to fix and before customers ever see them. We want guardrails that keep teams on the road without adding speed bumps, and we have no interest in process for its own sake. Each check should earn its place by helping people move quickly and trust what they ship.
We launch new systems the same way. Ambitious work rolls out in phases, and we prove each phase is safe before widening its reach. That’s how we take big swings without risking reliability or security. The result is a team that ships fast and sleeps well.
What should candidates know about the engineering practices or team norms that support agility?
There’s no playbook for turning a trillion-dollar, relationship-driven industry into a modern marketplace, so the people building Crexi are writing it as they go, and that shapes how we work.
Engineers here own their work. We hire self-starters who own their success metrics and see projects through to the result. Leadership is easy to reach, and if you bring an idea, you’re encouraged to run with it.
We build with AI every day. Our engineers use AI tools to scaffold, refactor, test and debug code, and they review that output for correctness, security and performance. Our leaders drive AI adoption themselves.
Engineering works closely with product, design and the business to decide what to build and why. Managers clear blockers and sort out dependencies between teams so work keeps moving. That’s how we stay agile, and it’s why we think Crexi is an exciting place to build.
Gridline’s private market investing platform helps wealth managers run private market programs at scale.
What’s it like to work on the engineering team at Gridline?
Working on Gridline’s engineering team means taking real ownership of meaningful work. Engineers are involved end to end, from early design through delivery, and are trusted to exercise sound technical judgment. We value creativity and a complete understanding of the systems we build.
What we ship today reaches clients tomorrow, but it is also built to last. Our platform is a long-lived system, and we live with the consequences of our technical decisions for years, not weeks. That is where engineering skill truly matters: designing for durability, learning from past choices and continually improving the foundation we build on.
The team is exceptional. Every engineer is highly skilled, self-directed and brings a distinct set of strengths and experience. That range of expertise creates a culture of continuous learning: We challenge one another, share knowledge openly and grow as engineers as a result.
Above all, we share a common goal: building the best possible product and delivering meaningful value to the people who rely on it. It is a demanding environment and a deeply rewarding one for engineers who want to do the best work of their careers.
How does your team move quickly while maintaining quality, reliability or security?
Speed and quality are genuinely in tension, and the work is in striking the right balance. These conversations often default to caution, but moving too slowly can sink a company just as easily as shipping something unreliable. Rapid iteration keeps us close to our clients and lets real feedback shape the product.
At the same time, some standards are fixed. Our clients trust us with sensitive financial data, so security is non-negotiable and considered first in every feature we design. Reliability has been a core expectation since day one.
AI helps us hold that balance. We use it across the entire lifecycle, not just to write code: It informs our designs, expands test coverage, strengthens monitoring and instrumentation, and keeps documentation current. Paired with rigorous design and code review, it lets us move faster while holding a high quality bar.
“We use it across the entire lifecycle, not just to write code: It informs our designs, expands test coverage, strengthens monitoring and instrumentation, and keeps documentation current.”
We are also deliberate about process. We regularly re-evaluate our development lifecycle and eliminate steps that no longer add value, keeping only the safeguards that earn their place. The result is a team that ships with urgency to meet clients’ needs today, while building a platform that will serve them for years to come.
What should candidates know about the engineering practices or team norms that support agility?
The most important norm on our team is a willingness to question everything, including our own practices. We approach process with healthy skepticism and an unsentimental eye. “That’s how we’ve always done it” is never sufficient justification on its own.
This matters because what worked well yesterday can quietly become obsolete, redundant or even counterproductive tomorrow. Tools change, the product matures and the team grows. A practice that once saved us time can just as easily start costing us time, and the only way to catch that is to keep asking whether each part of our workflow still serves its purpose.
That mindset depends on a culture where questions are welcomed, not tolerated. Any engineer, regardless of tenure, can challenge how something is done, and every question or concern deserves a thoughtful explanation. Sometimes, the answer confirms that a practice is worth keeping; other times, it reveals a better path forward. Either outcome makes us stronger. Candidates who do well here are curious, comfortable speaking up and motivated by finding better ways to work, not just by doing the work itself.
