Finding the balance between speed and quality is important for any engineering team, but it’s particularly critical for engineers at GlossGenius, since their work is the backbone of small businesses everywhere.
GlossGenius engineers build software and payment platforms for appointment-based businesses.The platform can handle a range of business needs like scheduling, point-of-sale, and payroll, along with marketing tools like website management, email and SMS marketing. Where many other product teams only focus on one of these domains, the engineering team at GlossGenius builds and stitches together these mission-critical fintech and software products. That’s why leaders like Vice President of Engineering Braden Allchin always bring the team back to their north star: the customer.
“To ensure quality doesn’t suffer for speed, we have made sure to set a high reliability bar for anything to be considered complete,” Allchin said. “We also stay close to the customer by bringing engineers onto customer experience calls, ensuring that the ‘speed’ of our development is always directed at solving real, high-quality needs for our pros.”
Customer empathy, clear ownership and cross-functional collaboration are all hallmarks of the engineering culture at GlossGenius. But don’t take our word for it: Hear from Braden about what engineers on his team can expect.
What does GlossGenius do?
GlossGenius is a tech company that offers a complete “business-in-a-box” platform with SaaS and fintech solutions for business owners, especially appointment-based businesses.
Describe your role and responsibilities. How long have you worked at GlossGenius?
I am the VP of engineering at GlossGenius and joined in early 2025. My core responsibility is supporting our engineering organization of approximately 100 people with a focus on structuring the team for scale, unblocking our talent and ensuring our technical strategy aligns with our mission to empower small business owners.
How GlossGenius Engineers Use AI and Emerging Technologies
How does the team stay ahead of emerging technologies like AI or automation?
We stay ahead by focusing on practical, high-impact application rather than hype. Internally, we explore AI to help our teams build more efficiently and have seen great success. While the market is evolving rapidly, we encourage experimentation in our day-to-day to bring to light better ways of working. Over the last few months we have invested in agentic software development, fundamentally changing how our engineering team plans and executes solving problems. We by no means are “vibe coding” our way forward but instead leverage context and custom skills to make the entire SDLC more effective. It is an exciting time as both an engineer and leader to use these tools and remind me of what made me fall in love with programming in the first place: the ability to create.
Professional Development Perks at GlossGenius
- Job training & conferences
- Online course subscriptions available
- Lunch and learns
- Coaching sessions
How Engineers Influence the Product Roadmap at GlossGenius
How does the engineering team directly influence the product roadmap each quarter?
Influence is driven through a high level of cross-functional collaboration and data-driven planning. After the company goals and OKRs are shared, each team shapes deliverables that will make an impact on said goals. We also provide a “bottoms-up” approach where engineers identify friction points, like technical debt or reliability issues and they are empowered to champion solutions.
Name a recent feature or improvement that originated from an engineer’s idea and describe its customer impact.
We held a company-wide hackathon in December and was impressed with what folks came together to develop in just 48 hours. There was encouragement to lean into AI and our winners developed a new product that analyzes our customer’s website and reviews and generates an action plan for how they can use the GlossGenius platform to improve their reputation. There had been a clear need for our customers to get a stronger feedback loop and the team nailed it. We are in the midst of productizing it and are excited to have a wider rollout in the coming months!
Engineering Culture and Ownership at GlossGenius
What guiding principles or decision criteria drive your tech-stack choices and architecture updates?
- Balance Trusted & Reliable vs. Bleeding Edge: We have velocity in our DNA and as a result prefer “tried and true” solutions because we know we can get to market faster. That doesn’t prevent us from trying new open-source solutions that are built on top of our foundations.
- Internal Enablement: We prioritize tools that help us move faster, such as a unified component library shared between engineering and design or AI-powered coding tools.
- Clear Swim Lanes: We choose architectures that foster ownership and accountability, allowing teams to move quickly without stepping on each other’s toes.
- Data-Driven Growth: We don’t just adopt tech for tech’s sake; we model our headcount and tech investments based on clear business metrics.
Which cultural practice best reflects your engineering values?
The practice of “show, don’t tell” best reflects our values. When a team member identifies a process or technical issue, the culture is to ask, “What’s your proposal?” This reflects our values of curiosity, independent thinking and ownership. We empower engineers to pilot their ideas; if it works, we scale it. This bias for action ensures that the best ideas actually drive the company forward.
How Engineering Success Is Measured at GlossGenius
What metric or milestone tells you the engineering team is succeeding in both product and cultural goals?
We have made tremendous progress on product success (reliability, observability coverage, fewer incidents) and cultural processes (ownership mentality and confidence to ship) this past year. Being comfortable with shipping every day and releasing our mobile application weekly to customers is a direct result of this investment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is it like to work as an engineer at GlossGenius?
Working as an engineer at GlossGenius means balancing speed with a high bar for reliability while building mission-critical fintech and SaaS tools for appointment-based small businesses. Engineers operate in a culture of ownership, cross-functional collaboration and “show, don’t tell,” where proposing and piloting solutions is expected. The team also experiments with AI and agentic software development to improve how they plan, build and ship, creating an environment focused on practical innovation and continuous learning.
How do engineers influence the product roadmap at GlossGenius?
Engineers influence the product roadmap through close cross-functional collaboration and data-driven planning tied to company goals and OKRs. In addition to shaping quarterly deliverables, they use a bottoms-up approach to surface friction points like technical debt or reliability issues and champion solutions. Ideas generated by engineers — including hackathon projects — can evolve into customer-facing products when they demonstrate clear impact.
Do engineers at GlossGenius work directly with customers?
Yes, engineers stay close to customers by joining customer experience calls to ensure development work addresses real, high-quality needs. Customer empathy is central to the engineering culture, and speed is intentionally directed toward solving meaningful problems for small business owners. Engineers also build tools that directly impact customers’ operations, from scheduling and payments to marketing and reputation management.
