Careers | Census

OUR MISSION

To build a data platform that enables everyone to have access to trusted data so they can take action and automate their business.

For years, our team was frustrated by how hard it was to get an accurate and complete picture of a customer. It seemed as though each department (engineering, marketing, sales, etc) had its own perspective, which always lacked some key data. Even worse, sometimes teams would have conflicting views on the same information!

We set out to build a single source of truth about customers that everyone could share. Along the way, we’re trying to help create a world of better, more agile business operations.

Helping business & data teams collaborate at

What we stand for

We use the term “operating principles” (inspired by Stripe) because these values are choices and they emphasize the tradeoff we're willing to make. If someone else couldn’t reasonably adopt the opposite value (“stability over speed” vs. “move fast and break things”) the value isn’t distinguishing — it’s a baseline expectation.

At Census, we expect everyone to hold to 3 baseline expectations: humility, integrity, and curiosity. These are not values that distinguish us from other companies but they are baseline expectations for working on our team.

We have 4 operating principles that uniquely guide how we operate and make decisions.

Trust by default

Autonomy. Learning not failing. Assume best intentions. Great responsibility = great power.

You’re going to get more trust than you’re used to, and we expect that you also have trust for your coworkers - assume they have best intentions. In many cases, this idea of trusting by default means that we want you to own things. This means that you might get less feedback than you’re used to, but in the absence of confirmation, you should go for it.

You're going to mess up. It's going to happen. We’re okay with that. You’re going to have to be okay with it as well. You won’t have everything planned out for you, or a playbook you can rely on, but by default… we're going to trust you to do the right thing.

1. First Contact

The first call is all about you. We want to make sure that Census aligns with what you want and you have what Census needs. We’re going to ask you to share what’s important to you in your search, tell us about the cool things you’ve done, exciting projects you led, a product that you took from 0–1, and how your success was measured. We’ll also talk about your preferred languages, fullstack/frontend/backend, and share each pod's focus.

Pro tip: Share examples that highlight how your work had a measurable impact on your team or company. Did you ship something? We love needle-movers.

2. Second Contact

Since we don’t have a California Class ship available, the second conversation is usually a face-to-face meeting via Zoom with the Hiring Manager. They are going to dive a little deeper into your experience, share more details about the role, and (for our engineers) get a CoderPad environment spun up to do a bit of coding.

Pro tip: When talking about your experience, try and use the STAR method — we think it’s a great way to showcase the work you did.

2a. Show us what you can do

This is where things start to get exciting. This step will vary based on the role you’re pursuing, but this is when it’s time for hands to hit the keyboards. This will typically be an example of work you will do in the role, a presentation, or a combo of an algorithm chat and lead coding.

Engineers, we value connections and your time. Giving you a take-home that takes hours(!) of your time without letting you meet the people you’ll build with seems a little unfair. All code evaluation is done face-to-face with the Hiring Manager and in 1-1s during the “onsite”.

3. Meet the team

Most roles will have you meet more of your team and other cross-functional stakeholders 1-1. Generally, this will be done over Zoom, but we also extend invites to our office when it makes sense.

Our Engineering “onsite” is designed to give you an idea of what it is actually like to build with us. You’ll meet with someone from Product for a brainstorm, code with one of our devs, share your values and hear about ours, talk through an algorithm, and get a chance to debrief all of it with the hiring manager.

4. Birds of a feather?

If you still have reservations about joining the team, let us know! We want you to have everything you need to make an educated decision. Want to talk to someone else on the team, our CEO Boris, or another founder before signing on the dotted line? Great! We’d love to set that up. Otherwise, if it’s a match on both sides, it’s time to get an offer delivered to your inbox so we can flock together.