What's It Like to Work at RapDev?

What practices make employees proud to work here?

Our employees take great pride in the caliber of the engineering we deliver to our clients and in the way we treat one another. On the work itself, we do not settle for what a client has asked us to build. Instead, we guide them toward what will serve them best over the long term, offering engineering suggestions beyond what they knew their platforms were capable of. We deliberately refuse to make clients dependent on us; we earn renewals through the quality of the engineering and by teaching client teams to support what we have built after the engagement ends. “Say yes, then figure it out” is a real operating model here, and our engineers take visible pride in accepting the harder problems others decline. 

On how we treat each other: We do not tolerate ego. Everyone is willing to answer teammates’ questions and lend a helping hand when someone is stuck, taking PTO or dealing with an unexpected emergency. We express our appreciation in our #love channel and nominate one another monthly for the “Kept on Keeping On” award. We take care of our customers and we take care of each other. It’s as simple as that.

How do leaders build trust and ensure transparency?

I love this question because trust is built on transparency at RapDev. We operate on the principle that all of our conversations, data, challenges and wins should be shared in open forms of communication. In practice, this means open Slack channels, weekly all-hands and open-office dialogue. We push everyone to work through issues and ask questions in public channels versus DMs (and we track it to make sure it’s happening!). We share all of our key performance indicators and financial results with the entire company so that every “RapDevian” can see how the business is actually performing in real time. And our compensation bands are published on Notion so that every RapDevian can understand precisely how their own pay is determined. We hold ourselves to the same standard with our clients, proactively surfacing any challenge, delivery risk or decision that may affect their timelines. We find that this level of transparency accelerates and reinforces trust.

How do employees describe RapDev’s reputation inside and outside the organization?

Externally, our customers recognize us for our creative engineering and “Say Yes” mentality. One of our engineers put it this way: With our team’s cumulative experience, there is really nothing we can’t do, so we are not afraid to take on a new challenge or an unfamiliar customer request. We can make big promises because we have confidence in our abilities, both individually and as a team. 

Internally, we consistently hear that people stay at RapDev because of the people. We hire kind and humble people who enjoy what they do, love sharing their knowledge and don’t take themselves too seriously. One of our tech leads recently shared that she knew RapDev was the place for her because it felt like her interviewers were “in it” together with her during her technical interview, and one of our new grad employees shared that from his first day, no one treated him as the new grad — that everyone, including colleagues who had themselves started 10 days earlier, made certain he felt supported. This foundation of collaboration enables everything we do for our customers and makes RapDev a truly wonderful place to work.