At Perpay, ‘we want to enable our engineers to grow as fast as possible’

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When Perpay’s CTO Arik Misler says the company is “always growing,” he means it. Literally. From each clearly defined rung on the fintech startup’s engineering career ladder to its light-bathed Center City office featuring living walls and a variety of collaborative workspaces, Perpay lives and breathes the concept of growth.

“We want to know what work excites you most,” Misler said. “Then, we can align your interests with daily challenges to help you get there.”

This is great news for job-seeking engineers of all levels looking for a career at a mission-driven company with seemingly endless ways to advance team member’s skills and career trajectories. 

While many tech companies say they offer career growth and development, the secret sauce at Perpay is the ability for team members to draw their own career map by stepping outside of their comfort zone, experimenting and taking on challenging new work with the support of great teammates and mentors.

Reimagining how things are done is a cornerstone of Perpay’s brand identity. Founded in 2017, Perpay set out to build inclusive tools and products that would enable everyone, no matter their credit score, to affordably finance big purchases from its e-commerce Marketplace. Since then, Perpay has advanced its mission to help consumers create healthy habits and achieve economic stability with new offerings, such as Perpay+ Credit Building and the Perpay Credit Card. 

True to form, Perpay found a way to set the standard for team member growth and development with a structured yet engaging approach to hiring, onboarding, and developing a strong, motivated engineering team.

Recruiting with intention

A year and a half ago, when Austin-based software engineer Greg Militello was considering his next career move, a simple, strategic step on Perpay’s part sealed his interest in working for the company.

“As an engineer, the very first contact you have with Perpay is with one of their engineers,” Militello said. “That really spoke to me.”

Militello was used to wading through surface-level conversations with company recruiters and support staff. Having the opportunity to speak with another engineer as his very first point of contact helped him bond with the Perpay team and gave him a clear picture of what it would be like to work there. 

Soon after, Militello relocated from Austin to Philly and hasn’t looked back. 

Onboarding with mentorship

First days at a new job can be notoriously nerve-wracking. The Perpay team works to eliminate potential moments of anxiety and discomfort by providing a thoughtful and detailed onboarding experience. 

Over the first week, new hires are paired with different team members to learn the tech stack, internal processes and company culture. It’s a structured process for learning the ropes and building momentum, with just enough autonomy and flexibility to explore and try new things.

Take Mieraf Mulat’s experience. The Northwestern grad and software engineer, who has been with the company for less than a year, was excited and a little nervous to learn that within her first week, she’d have to create something and launch it into production. She paired with a senior engineer to tackle a bug on a customer form and shipped it later that day.

“We are challenged and pushed to grow as much as possible since the first day,” said Mulat. “But not without constant support.”

Professional development built in

Once new engineers have gotten their feet wet, they work closely with managers to climb a career ladder explicitly built for the engineering teams. 

“The ladder provides clear guidelines for how to move forward across areas such as technical execution, communication and leadership,” Misler said, “and helps managers tie their feedback to the areas in which their engineers need to grow.” These real-time feedback loops and a semi-annual review process help engineers keep their goals on track.

Even with the guidelines and practices, individual growth is based on team members’ professional interests, combined with consideration of the evolving needs of the business.

Two and a half years ago, when Emily Stahle came to Perpay as a full-stack engineer fresh out of the University of North Carolina, her strength was in front-end development. Once she learned she could choose which tickets to work on, Stahle intentionally picked the ones with back-end tasks to get out of her comfort zone.

Her first project was migrating Perpay’s marketplace infrastructure, which serves millions of visitors each year, to Kubernetes. She was offered the support of a staff engineer for guidance and the opportunity to ask questions, but pushed herself to figure out as much as she could on her own by exploring publicly available resources and looking at the existing codebase.

“I had to study our previous architecture to understand our new infrastructure patterns… I learned a lot about AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform as I went,” Stahle said.

Since then, she’s ramped up her full-stack skills by purposefully choosing tickets with back-end tasks, furthering her impact on numerous projects and is now working on the monster task of automating deployments.

“The fact that I’m doing all this only two and a half years in is a big deal,” Stahle said. “The friends I went to college with have more specific roles and only get to work in one area, whereas I’ve gotten to learn about anything I’m interested in and have touched so much of our code base.”

Leadership opportunities abound

As a mid-level engineer on the brink of senior status, Taylor Gannon, a self-taught engineer, was ready to take on more responsibility.

“In my first week, I came in with experience in JavaScript,” Gannon said, “but all of our tickets were in Python.” She spent her early days Googling syntax questions and “faking it ‘till [she] made it.” Through pairing, code review and RFCs (request for comments), Taylor grew as a full-stack engineer, owning a carefully charted course of increasingly complex features. Soon, she was putting her React expertise and new Python knowledge to the test as a crucial Perpay Credit Card team member. 

Two and a half years later, she’s not only working on a completely new version of Perpay’s e-commerce storefront — she’s leading the team.

“It’s a big project,” she said. “I’m way out of my comfort zone, in uncharted territory. But that’s the sweet spot of learning!”

Now, in addition to updating the e-commerce stack to a JavaScript application, Gannon is also learning how to delegate responsibilities to her team. And that’s inspired her to think even bigger.

A great place to learn

Much like the office’s naturally lit, fresh, green environment, Perpay provides all of the resources its new engineers need to grow — from career ladders that clearly define the next steps to books and lunch-and-learns, to the fact that at any time, the team can evolve together to change the way work is being done.

“If you want to learn new things and grow, this place encourages it,” said Stahle, the UNC alum. “You never get stuck doing the same thing. It’s energizing to come to work.”

Currently, Perpay is hiring senior full-stack engineers, mid-level front-end engineers and software managers. And before you think you need to know everything before you apply, rest assured, you’ll learn on the job. 

“We’re looking for fast learners with a good foundation,” Misler said. “We’re not super particular about the languages you know; we’re looking to understand who you are as a person and how you relate to our mission. We invest in people for the future. We can help you learn.”