Joining the RoboShadow Team

Team Culture What to Expect ?

We decided to write this blog as we are often asked "How do you build the dev team culture in RoboShadow". We are also growing the team, and we wanted to put out a note to all new developers joining the team to ensure they know what they are signing up for. 

This blog is not intended to scare people off but to manage the expectation of any new member joining the team.  We only want "A" grade people in our team (that can still mean you can be junior and be "A" grade with the right mentality). This blog hopefully tells the world and any new team members that:

"We mean business with our Mission Statement.  We want to remove the cost and the complexity within Cyber Security for the world.  We want to enable everyone to protect themselves, regardless of cyber budget or skill set".  So if your joining us, you need to be all in on this principle :)

Where will you be working ?

You are coming to work for a growing UK Cyber Security Start Up who are part of the National Cyber Security Centre Alumni (NCSC) which is part of the GCHQ.  We are going through the Product Market Fit phase and have already fended off multiple acquisition requests.

Having experience in a team like ours, particularly at this stage of our journey, means that you can work anywhere in the world. It demonstrates your 'Start-Up' experience, being part of a team that is navigating through 'Product Market Fit' and ultimately, the scaling out stage  

This is not a normal team, you will realise this straight away if you join, we expect full commitment. If this is not what you want to sign up for then there are plenty of other teams you can work in. You would be part of a startup that is trying to change the world (as most good startups are), we expect your performance to reflect that. Please don’t join if you just want a normal job, this is not going to be one of those. 

Our Mission Statement

We have a commercial offering for our platform which is now starting to work at an enterprise level (that pays the bills), however we have schools in Panama, healthcare providers in Chile and charities all over the world that use our product completely free of charge to help protect themselves from Cyber Security incidents. Our mission is to enable organisations without significant skills or large budgets, to keep themselves Cyber Safe.

We built RoboShadow to allow the world to gain better access to free usable Cyber Tools to effectively get an internal and external penetration test completely free of charge. We get so many great emails from users thanking us for our Free Tier and the fact we support users even on our Free Tier capability.  

This is what drives our team and this is where our pride comes from, not revenue. 

The CEO of Duolingo wanted to bring English Language learning to the world for free to allow the developing world to gain better access to skills, jobs and make a better life for themselves. It is stories like Duolingo’s that inspired us to want to do the same and allow any team or individual anywhere in the world to help protect themselves better from Cyber Security threats without the need for any real skills completely free of charge.

Given our altruistic goals, most of our team is pretty committed, they often work longer hours and put more effort in, as they know they are making a difference. As mentioned, working at RoboShadow is not “just another job” to our team, its much more. 

So if our mission statement doesn’t motivate you then please don’t join our team.

What tech are we working on?

The core engineering team behind RoboShadow spent 20 years in Investment banking and the last 10 years in global cloud architecture, everything about RoboShadow is serverless, and state of the art engineering. Our code practices have to be perfect, and everything has to follow clean code engineering and security principles. This sounds great, but it means we cant deal with hacky unreadable code, we have to expect the highest standards of our Dev team which has some drawbacks. It means we have to keep rolling with the times and keep constantly upgrading our knowledge and checking what we do against best practices. If you are not someone that likes to keep being challenged to learn new things in the pursuit of maintaining a place in a “state of the art” team, then this role is not for you. 

Our technology is built for infinite scale which is why Product Market Fit is so important for us, as the paid users can fuel the platform globally for all of our free users. 

Getting this right will change the world.  We are already starting to push other vendors to follow suit .

Culture

You may have guessed that culture means everything to us. It is what drives our relentless obsession to build the world’s best Free Tier Cyber Product. We help each other, we inspire each other, we commit hours,  ideas, and just about everything we can to help get the team and the product to a place where we can ultimately reach our mission statement.

Our culture transcends language, and our team includes members who may not be fluent in English, culture isn’t “Green Tea & Yoga” its about driving our mission statement. We support each other to do well and push the mission statement at every opportunity (its not about when the next company fun day is being held). We are all pretty hardcore and that is the way we like it. We follow fairly tightly the Netflix culture deck (which most of the top Silicon Valley companies do).

https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

If this is not what you want in a role, then please don’t join our team,

What do we expect

• Give everything you can, this is not a normal team, it's not a normal job. If you want a normal job with a slower pace of life then please don’t join our team.
• We need you to learn the tech stack we use super quick, and how we like to do things. If you're smart and you can do it all in work time then great. If not, we would expect you to learn outside in your own time to keep up.
• We need you to be pleasant, and helpful, we don’t hire “brilliant Jerks”, you're expected to be a joy to work with. 
• Learn and interact with the Mission Statement, again if your not bothered about changing the world, don’t join this team.
• Over commit yourself sometimes, and if this means you need to do extra to cover it, then please be proud of this (the rest of the team do).
• We are a mentoring, tutoring team (we love helping each other to grow). However don’t drain the resources of our senior team unnecessarily, this won't go down well. Don’t ask us stupid questions that you can Google yourself or watch a 10 minute YouTube video. 
• We expect you to be up and running , taking work on, solving problems, and delivering excellence within 2 weeks. Otherwise people are usually asked to leave. So don’t join if you are not confident in your own abilities.

We have an amazing Team already, anyone joining our team needs to compliment a wonderful, dedicated team. If you accept a position with us we expect you to be fully brought into the mission statement, our culture, and our values. One last time, this is not a normal role, don’t join this team if you want “just another job”. Don’t join this team if you don’t know what it means to be part of a successful startup team with a strong mission statement. There are other jobs for you, just not this one.