July 18, 2024 • 5 minute read •

A Look Inside the Dagster Labs Culture

Name: Eunice Ho
Handle: @eunice

Hi! I’m Eunice Ho, the Operations Lead at Dagster Labs.

When I first started working, I started as a Sales Associate at Macy's and evolved through roles like a Workplace Coordinator at Thumbtack, where I enjoyed collaborating across IT, recruiting, people ops, and public comms. Now, as an Operations Lead, I bring my passion for supporting various teams to ensure we all thrive together.

A photo of the Dagster Labs team at their offsite in early 2024.

When candidates ask why I joined Dagster Labs back in 2021, my answer is always the same – it’s the people and the culture. Beyond building an amazing product, we have a team of talented and supportive individuals who foster a collaborative and empowering culture.

Today I’m going to share some of the things that I like most about that culture.

Celebrating Successes Together

Open our company Slack channel on any given day, and you’ll see it brimming with celebratory posts, acknowledgments, and shoutouts to the team. Emoji reactions decorate messages as we verbalize our appreciation for one another, and I do my best to throw my fair share in as well to show my support! Shoutouts, whether from our team members or our CEO, are a regular occurrence here. During All Hands meetings, we always set aside time to celebrate work anniversaries, or “Dagsterversaries,” to recognize everyone’s contributions to our success.

We make it a priority to work hard, but we never forget to celebrate our achievements.

Transparency and Trust

I’ll never forget when Pete, our CEO, said something along the lines of, “We should be transparent and give our team as much insight as possible into our decision-making. People join startups to experience the ins and outs of how a company works.” This philosophy created a high-trust culture where we share board decks and investor updates with the entire team. We trust our team to handle sensitive information responsibly while gaining a deep understanding of our collective goals and challenges.

Core Values with Meaning

As we grow, maintaining our culture has been a top priority. Through collaborative conversations and offsite activities, we developed a set of values embodying Dagster Labs and guiding our decision-making throughout the company. Embracing these values means acknowledging that every strength has a corresponding trade-off, and it's in how we manage these trade-offs that our culture truly shines. We consider these values when recruiting, incorporating them into our offer letters, performance reviews, and shoutouts.

Executing With Ambition

We are a team driven to execute with fierce urgency, thinking big and aiming high. The tradeoff for this is that while we value sustainability and “having a life” outside of work, we understand and accept that our competitive market might require extra hours and weekend work occasionally. We value grit resilience, and are able to persevere to get to the best outcomes.

Being a Global Optimizer

We optimize for the group and the company, supporting one another to succeed and multiply our impact beyond the sum of our individual parts. The tradeoff is that this requires clear communication and documentation and, while we might lose focus locally and expend additional energy on context-switching, we recognize and accept this as necessary to achieve the broader visibility and input needed to ensure our collective success.

Respecting the Craft

We hold ourselves to high standards and trust each other to do the same, believing that quality and velocity are not at odds with each other. We invest extra effort to achieve excellence, constantly iterating and improving our output even if it means fewer outcomes in the same amount of time.

Prioritizing the Developer Experience

We started off as an OSS project, with our community having been with us the entire journey and serving as the reason Dagster Labs exists. Improving the developer experience at Dagster Labs is everyone’s responsibility, even if it means doing unscalable things initially to enhance customer satisfaction and figuring out improvements later.

Being Human

Our workplace reflects the diversity of our employees’ interests, backgrounds. We create experiences to foster meaningful connections and encourage genuine interactions among colleagues, even if it means putting extra effort into diversity and inclusivity.

Commitment to Growth

Continuous improvement is key to personal and professional growth. Alongside biannual 360 reviews, we prioritize regular feedback through 6-week peer reviews. Managers solicit feedback on what we’re doing well and where we can improve, ensuring that every team member has the opportunity to refine their skills and contribute effectively.

We also invest in our team's growth with an annual stipend for job-related classes, books, and resources, along with mentoring and coaching to foster a learning environment.

Remote-First, Flexible Work

As a remote-first company, we highly value flexibility. Our team can work from anywhere within the U.S., ensuring at least 4 hours of collaborative time each day across different time zones. While remote work is our norm, we recognize the value of collaborating in person. We have offices in San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis, and team members can use nearby co-working spaces if they prefer or aren’t near one of our offices.

A photo of the San Francisco Dagster Labs co-working space.

Our remote setup doesn’t prevent us from connecting meaningfully. We’ve shared happy hours, team-building activities, virtual/in-person cooking classes, and many meals together. Our annual company offsite is a highlight, where we fly everyone out to a location for a week of presentations, collaborative discussions, team-building activities, and, of course, lots of food! Teams also plan their own offsites, creating memorable moments and experiences throughout the year. Virtual events like cooking classes, terrarium building, and even talent shows help keep us connected between the offsites.

It also goes without saying that given our dispersed team, we rely heavily on Zoom meetings. Despite this, we’re very mindful of each other's time, ensuring that meetings start on time, are efficient (speedy meetings enabled), and have cameras typically turned on to show engagement.

Join Us at Dagster Labs

At Dagster Labs, we're committed to building an inclusive and supportive team where everyone feels welcome. If you want to be a part of a high-performing software development environment that values diversity, collaboration, and continuous growth, Dagster Labs is the place for you.

Check out our available roles from time to see the roles we’re looking to add to our team!

If you want to support the Dagster Open Source project, be sure to Star our Github repo.

We're always happy to hear your feedback, so please reach out to us! If you have any questions, ask them in the Dagster community Slack (join here!) or start a Github discussion. If you run into any bugs, let us know with a Github issue. And if you're interested in working with us, check out our open roles!

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