Ema (CA) reviews

Leadership has created a culture of fear and anxiety rather than trust. The CEO regularly messages employees at all hours and expects immediate responses, even at 2 AM. Middle management monitors everything you do across systems, including personal calendars, and constantly reports it back to the C-Suite. Time is frequently interrupted with unnecessary “fire drills” that are more like control tactics than actual business needs. Attrition is incredibly high because most people leave or are fired without clear justification within 6 months. Leadership will go behind your back to contact customers directly if they feel excluded, then wait until team calls to share the details in a confrontational way. The reason they're excluded is because they join unprepared and derail conversations with irrelevant use cases and collateral, yet they insist on being included in everything. You will be undermined at all times. If you value stability, respect, and work-life balance, this is not the place.

The biggest gap right now is the middle management layer. We've scaled the team fast but there aren't enough experienced engineering managers and directors between the ICs and the senior leadership. That means you sometimes get pulled into a steerco or escalation call that probably should have been handled a layer above you. The company knows this and is hiring for it, but it's felt in the meantime. Context switching can be intense. With many many customer projects running simultaneously across different areas, priorities can shift week to week depending on which customer has the loudest need. If you need a perfectly predictable sprint plan, this will frustrate you. Documentation and internal tooling haven't always kept up with growth. Things like onboarding docs, runbooks, and standardized processes across customer delivery teams are getting better but are still a work in progress. You have to be comfortable with some ambiguity. Work-life balance is what you'd expect at a fast-growing startup going after a massive market. Nobody forces late nights, but the pace is real. If you're in a customer-facing role especially, the timezone spread across US, UK, India, and Japan means some odd-hours meetings are unavoidable.