Senior Backend Engineer, Goodnotes

Company cares about each and everyones wellbeing. A monthly budget is provided for everyone to take care of their physical and mental wellbeing. You can book a massage, spa, spend on therapist or anything you want to take care of your health.

The way the organisation is structured encourages autonomy. Asynchronous first working culture and dedicated individual project lets you focus on you work and make an impact without a manager looking over your shoulder.

Everyone here at GoodNotes is amazing! You have to go through a rigorous cultural interview process to get into the company, which also means that people you'll be working with has also gone through and checked all the boxes to be a cultural fit.

The company offers a monthly self-improvement budget so you can take classes like music, language, etc.

I got a gift sent to my home address when I accepted the offer.

You're not encouraged to work your ass off outside hours. If you have to, maybe because you're not working smart. The company reimburses your payment for meditation apps, gym, or flu shots.

I work almost asynchronously and remotely because my team and I are in a different time zone, but I don't feel abandoned because I have all the help I could wish for in our overlapping time. My manager convinced me to participate in a local hackathon and often asked if I knew and wanted to join some interesting, optional local event (this was good because I could skip a lot of announcements about them until I learned not to skip them).

My teammates are really intelligent people with excellent performance, it makes me quickly learn everything I need in the current project. It's great that, despite this, there is no demonstrative superiority in them: they are glad to share their experience and easily learn something new themselves.

At GoodNotes, we have a buffer week between cycles without any daily routines. This is a week when you can learn something for your work that you never had time for, reflect on your previous cycle, plan a new one. Planning is really transparent, and you can push some of your initiatives into the future and influence the choice of tasks for your (your team, your company) next cycle. It is really interesting to hear (read) suggestions from people from all over the company and offer your own.

Working very closely with our users allows us to build on our strong foundations and continue to improve every day. Being able to work asynchronously and know that what I am doing today will help a team member tomorrow is very rewarding. We work quickly and in a goal-oriented manner and this allows us to measure our impact consistently each cycle.

Having regular meetings with our team, or wider company meetings allows us to share our thoughts and feelings on many topics, as well as feel included in decision making. Big decisions are constantly being made and opinions are sought in order to make the process transparent and ensure the direction being taken is a cohesive one.

Whatever your situation, you are able to work in a way that suits you. Working asynchronously means that the work we do is not necessarily tied to a 9-5 schedule. If we have an errand to run we can do it, if we've finished the work for the day then we can go relax and recharge for tomorrow. All about working smarter and ensuring that our lives don't revolve around our work.

“Work smarter, not harder” is one of GoodNotes’ mottos. In case I felt unproductive for an hour, I can always take a pause and continue working when I feel I can give my best, and the team supports you.

Yoga, gym, extra language courses, compensation framework - everything that is needed to make sure you feel appreciated and supported - will be covered at GoodNotes.

I started working at GoodNotes as an intern. The team always made me feel comfortable sharing my opinion and always encouraged me to grow. Most importantly, I truly believe that GoodNotes' people make the company so unique. Everyone talks about the product as if it was their own. I guess that's why we call ourselves GoodFamily. We even have a channel where we thank each other for the contribution that was made. The only downside of it: it's better to make sure that a pack of tissues is next to you because it's going to make you emotional!

I feel like my colleagues are my friends (even though I never met them in real life) I laugh with them every week and they are there for me

On day 1 they ask you when you want to have your work hours, it allows me to plan my day how I want. Also there is no issue to switch some hours around if you need to run some private errands.

You can literally book a meeting with everyone in the company - everyone is super open to feedback and a chat. I have a 'manager', but he's there to support me and not to manage me - as flat as a company can be.

My functional manager is passionate about support and communication with his team. It's really clear what my levels of progression are and if I'm not on track with these then it's flagged early. We also have a development budget and we promote sharing knowledge and new skills between team members.

We have a direct line of communication with our founder/CEO as well as open and honest 1:1's with management. Each cycle we have a 'town hall' meeting where we can submit anonymous questions to our CEO and/or the wider management team about anything we're unsure or curious about at GoodNotes. In the Design function we have bi-weekly catchups, one for project reviews/questions and another for 'aligning' - be it a design retro or just playing games together.

My team, function and the wider community at GoodNotes are all genuinely very supportive. From shout-outs and kudos to a general sense of empathy and support. We also have access to health insurance and, separately to that, we have a monthly health budget. Massage? Therapy? Gym membership? Yes please!

Being able to work with smart, multi-talented, passionate, and FUN people is one of the main reasons I’m at the company for 6 years and counting.

We have millions of users around the world who are using our product for multiple hours per day. Many of them told us that our app is the main reason they bought an iPad and an Apple Pencil in the first place.

We’re one of the first apps in the space and have been a market leader ever since. A lot of the technology we're using and that we're currently working on are cutting edge. We have a large in-house Machine Learning and Research team and develop most of our own models that create hard-to-imitate competitive advantages while making the products better for our users.

I worked in the HK office at GoodNotes to begin with. 4 months in, my boyfriend received a job offer in Berlin. Not only were GoodNotes fine with my decision to become a remote worker so early on, but helped make the entire process run smoothly- visas, new contracts etc. Not only that, they trust you to get your work done & therefore, if you have a visa appointment or vaccine appointment midday... it's no problem!

GoodNotes app is my first job in the tech/start up world. I'm the youngest in the company & have only been with the company for 9 months... but they've already trusted me to run projects for the marketing, product & growth team. Now, I'm currently managing 6 others. Not only that, my employees are always sharing pockets of wisdom, hosting workshops & collaborating together

The company actively supports your physical and mental wellbeing. We have a personal development budget, and a mental or physical budget to spend each month! This covers my gym & coursera membership. When I was working in the HK office (because of the pandemic) the company were concerned about employees taking pubic transport to work, thus, they covered our uber expenses to make sure we got to & from the office safely. They are also happy for you to work remotely for 1 month out of the year to give you a chance to be with family abroad without using up too much of your leave!

We are going through an incredible period of growth, which creates a lot of opportunities for the entire business. We believe strongly in delivering the highest quality products to our users and that requires everyone to push themselves outside of their comfort zone, regardless of the function they work in. A lot of the projects we work on are challenging because we are pushing the boundaries of innovation, so a lot of the time we're defining processes from scratch, or recreating what's considered "best practice"!

We have bi-monthly town hall where our CEO openly answers questions from anyone in the company. Our CEO also writes a weekly internal blog where he shares insights and updates on anything that's deemed important. Most of our work is documented and fully accessible through our internal communication tools such as Quip, Notion or Slack.

We offer genuine flexibility when it comes to schedules and work loads. There are occasions where you may need to be present for team meetings, but we don't enforce a strict work hours policy and try to encourage as much asynchronous work as possible. If you're finished for the day, feel free to log off. Need to pop to the bank? Just go! This is a grown-up work culture, we don't clock watch or expect you to report on every minute of every day! We also value work-life balance, so actively discourage working overtime.

I think as GoodNotes has such a strong focus on "Working smarter, not harder", there is definitely a priority on ensuring that everyone has a strong work-life balance. This shows itself in many faucets of working at GoodNotes, one of the major ones being a manageable workload

Really amazing perks at GoodNotes - far better than most other tech companies I've worked at. GoodNotes offers a VERY generous work-from-home office budget, flexible working (both in terms of time and location), and various other great benefits.

GoodNotes is very focussed on employee wellbeing through a variety of ways. They offer a number of benefits to improve employee wellbeing (such as a "Health and Wellness" budget, which can go towards anything from a gym membership to therapy) - and are receptive to suggestions from employees to improve things further.