Fastly is a terrible place to be an engineer. Working for Fastly you won't have any authority or ownership over your work, as technical decisions are made by VPs and senior directors, while you are still accountable for any failures. Worse than this, if you try to build tooling to make work easier for yourself and your team, management will quickly intervene to stop you demanding to know "what problem are you trying to solve", and then enforce a terrible solution that maintains inefficiency.
As an engineer in Fastly you will have no influence over what you build or ow you build it. This place is hazardous to career development, as your problem-solving skills will atrophy.
The engineering culture is bad. "Technical debt" is a dirty word here, and mentioning it will trigger an outburst from the nearest manager (usually somebody who built up that technical debt and got promoted for it). Incident postmortems are shallow, as there is no distinction drawn between a trigger and a root cause issue. We build fragile systems that are easily broken, and we play "pass the parcel" to avoid owning the most critical systems, knowing we will lose our job the second we make a mistake... but management still won't tolerate words like "test coverage" or "resilience", or any attempt to make it easier to deploy & rollback changes safely.
The end result is that we now have a fragile ecosystem of opaque systems that nobody understands (The recent layoffs exacerbated this).
Fastly has failed to adapt to changes in our industry, and we have fallen behind Akamai.
Services are gradually degrading, issues are piling up, and leadership destroyed any motivation to fix it.
Don't join Fastly, it will ruin your career.
