Back in 2018, Cooper Simmons approached his manager at Square Root with a request: He wanted to become an engineering manager. Unfortunately for Simmons, his request was denied, but only in part. While there wasn’t an open engineering manager position, Simmons’ manager understood how passionate he was about leadership and created a new role for him: dev lead. Simmons took it, and by the time his dream job became available he was ready.
“Fast forward to 2021: Square Root was acquired and is now a part of CDK Global,” Simmons said. “During the acquisition, an opportunity to become engineering manager opened up, and I was able to get the position specifically because I spent time in a dev lead role.”
Simmons’ story is not uncommon in the Austin tech world, where many companies go to great lengths to help their employees reach their career goals. In addition to creating new positions, companies have also been known to let team members chart their own career course by providing opportunities to work in different departments and roles than what they were originally hired for and, in some cases, by creating their own roles or teams.
The natural next question is a two-parter: What companies are these and are they hiring? Continue reading to receive the answer to the first part of that question. As for the second part, the answer is a resounding “yes” — to the tune of 182 open roles, to be exact.
What role were first hired for at Atmosphere?
Originally I was hired as an account executive for our distribution team, and I primarily worked with SMB accounts. While in this role, I learned my sweet spot was working with mid-size bars, restaurants and axe-throwing venues! My main goal was to help businesses enhance the customer experience and cut overhead costs.
Prior to working at Atmosphere, I had the pleasure of experiencing our product at a local restaurant in my hometown. Because it made such a positive impact on my dining experience, I went home that night, researched the company and wrote Atmosphere on my list of companies I’d like to work for one day Note: This list had a total of two companies on it.
About one year later, that goal turned into a reality. As an account executive, I shared my passion for the product with prospects every day. My favorite part about the job was hearing from customers about the difference our product made for their business’ atmosphere, employees and customers.
What role are you in now?
I currently manage our strategic partnerships sub-department that resides in our marketing department. I was promoted to the marketing team as a brand strategist and later I received a second promotion. I now serve as our head of strategic partnerships. Atmosphere was a small startup when I first joined. We did not have a marketing department, but I was seeking opportunities to both generate leads and create brand awareness for the company.
After our VP of marketing joined, I pitched a webinar to our sales leadership and worked with our new VP to complete the project. I believe launching that webinar is what led me to the marketing team. The coolest project I’m currently working on is creating the strategic partnerships sub-department. We promoted one of my colleagues, Alix Baugh, from our account management team and the two of us are currently building the core of our team together.
How has Atmosphere your career growth throughout this journey?
Working for a company that not only believes in promoting from within but also supports employees’ personal and professional development has been an absolute dream. I wake up every morning feeling grateful to be part of Atmosphere. Having leaders who take the time to listen and help employees truly goes a long way. With the support and guidance from leadership, I had the courage to test the boundaries of my role, which ultimately led to the creation of the position I’m in today.
As a woman in a male-dominated industry, Atmosphere has created an environment where I feel empowered to come forward with my thoughts, ideas and strategies. For that and many other reasons, I’m truly grateful to be a part of this company. This culture and support system ultimately stems from both our co-founders, Leo and John Resig, and from our C-suite. Their mentality of grit, perseverance and humility laid the foundation of our company’s culture, and as we scale, this mentality continues to shine through our leaders and employees.
What role were first hired for at Real Chemistry?
When I started as a senior analyst at Real Chemistry, then W2O, I mainly worked on social listening analytics projects. I analyzed social media data to understand topics and trends that drive conversations by key stakeholders, such as health care providers, patient advocates, investors and consumers. I also identified influencers and opinion leaders within those discussions in order to inform clients’ marketing and communications strategies.
What role are you in now?
I’m now in a hybrid role as a manager of analytics and analyst advocate leading our tech automation and advocacy center of excellence. I act as a bridge between the analyst and engineering teams to foster communication and adoption of tech within the organization. I elbowed my way into this role by documenting methodologies, workflows, troubleshooting, communicating workarounds when tools broke down and making resources available to other analysts in the organization.
My manager made it clear from the beginning that my experience and goals — not only as an employee but more importantly as a person — are valid and relevant to my success at work. I felt completely comfortable bringing up the topic of this new, hybrid role and how it would fit into my existing work.
I honestly never doubted that it was the right conversation to have, because I knew that it was something I was passionate about and that would bring value to my colleagues. The coolest part about my hybrid role is that I have a seat at the table among developers and engineers to speak on behalf of the analyst teams, prioritizing tech and feature development that will make our analytics work even better.
How has Real Chemistry supported your career growth throughout this journey?
Part of what I value and appreciate about working at Real Chemistry is that you are truly supported and encouraged — from executive leadership to your direct supervisors — to carve out your own unique path for growth. “Build yours” is a motto at Real Chemistry, and we mean it. I knew that the standard trajectory wasn’t for me: I wanted to stay in the weeds and become an expert in our in-house analytics technology rather than move into a more client-facing analytics role.
My supervisors heard me and took my opinions seriously. They affirmed my career goals by dedicating time within my week for the tech-related analyst advocacy work, making it an official hybrid role and incorporating that work into the performance review goals that I am evaluated against.
What role were first hired for at Square Root?
I was hired at Square Root as the first DevOps/infrastructure engineer. It was my role to automate deployments of our platforms in AWS, improve our CI/CD pipelines, monitor and respond to any application and infrastructure issues across our platforms, and guide and train other engineers in DevOps principles and practices.
What role are you in now?
I am now engineering manager at CDK Global. I started my IT career doing help desk support, then moved into doing infrastructure/IT operations work with actual physical hardware in data centers! After that there was a natural progression toward doing development and automation work as the cloud and DevOps became relevant. The biggest leap for me was my recent transition to managing people and projects.
Throughout my career, I’ve always had teams and managers who have supported me stretching myself and learning new things. The coolest project I’m working on right now is a larger initiative we have to modernize our platforms. Learning new technology — like containerization, Kubernetes and React+NestJS — is always interesting, but what I love most is watching people grow and learn.
How has Square Root and CDK Global supported your career growth throughout this journey?
My managers at Square Root were always interested in my career growth. In 2018, I wanted to transition from engineer to engineering manager but there was not enough growth at the time to support me being a manager officially. So, my manager promoted me into a dev lead role on our infrastructure team. This role did not already exist. It gave me a chance to be a leader and mentor to my team, aid in the planning of product development and timelines, and provided the opportunity to interact with and influence other parts of the company, like engineering as a whole, product and more.
Square Root was acquired and is now a part of CDK Global. During the acquisition, an opportunity to become engineering manager opened up, and I was able to get the position specifically because I spent time in a dev lead role. My time as a dev lead also better prepared me to handle priorities across multiple teams and gave me an opportunity to learn how to strategize and build across all parts of the company.
What role were you first hired for at CrowdStrike?
When I started at CrowdStrike in November 2017, I was a senior in college at The University of Texas at Austin. I was hired when the CrowdStrike Austin office first opened as a sales development intern. As an intern, I prospected for corporate account executives, collaborated with the sales ops team to clean up account data, shadowed account executives and worked on any project that was asked of me. Getting a glimpse at multiple areas of the sales organization was a great experience.
What role are you in now?
Currently, I am the team lead on the account management renewals team. Prior to this role, I was on the SDR team and an intern. While I was in my previous role, I was able to meet with people on different teams. After getting information on the responsibilities of each role, I got a better idea of which position I would be the best fit for.
As a team lead, I am collaborating with leadership to build a scalable training program and guide for new hires and the current team. Going from three to 15 people on the team over the last 1.5 years has created the need for effective onboarding processes. This has been an exciting project to work on because I feel I’m having a tangible effect on the team’s enablement and success.
How has CrowdStrike supported your career growth throughout this journey?
Having the chance to work at an innovative and fast-growing company right out of college has been an experience I am very grateful for. The leadership teams at CrowdStrike prioritize having active conversations about career goals and are willing to provide you with advice and the tools to get to your next role.
Being in a role that works with multiple departments at CrowdStrike — including legal, finance, sales ops, the alliance team, and more — and with others outside of the company, like customers and channel resellers, has taught me the importance of clear communication and collaboration. Exposure to different situations in my role and learning from those around me has helped hone my style of collaboration and communication. I am excited to see how those skills grow as I develop in my career.
What role were first hired for at AffiniPay?
Nearly 13 years ago, I was hired to run the two-person marketing team at our small company that provided payment solutions to an underserved professional community. Through affinity partnerships, we built marketing programs within professional associations, which included print ads in their journals, delivering continuing education courses, advertising in electronic newsletters and sponsoring and exhibiting at trade shows.
As with any startup, you could also find me packing suitcases for trade shows, brainstorming design concepts with our CEO or planning events for our partners. If a group of executive directors were in town, we created a unique ATX experience: Salt Lick in the Hill Country for BBQ or a private tour of the LBJ Library. We never took a cookie-cutter approach!
We always made time for fun, celebrating birthdays, work anniversaries, babies, marriages and everything in between. We’ve scaled in size and now process $13 billion in payments annually but have never lost sight of our strong culture. We still bring unique ideas to the table, celebrate wins and support each other like family.
What role are you in now?
I am now the vice president of “Affinity Programs,” overseeing the growth of over 200 affinity programs across legal, accounting and architecture professional associations. This channel accounts for about one-third of our portfolio, and my team works feverishly to ensure the success of every partnership. We also have the luxury of having access to AffiniPay’s large, in-house creative, brand and marketing operations teams.
I am currently working to educate our affinity partners about our new buy now, pay later financing product, ClientCredit. When I started in 2009, one of our biggest challenges was that professionals only got paid for 70 percent of their time because of a lack of convenient ways to get paid. At the time, checks were the only way to get paid. It has been fun to see the progression of credit card acceptance. We are now entering a new era, and the clients our professionals serve are seeking new methods to pay for services. Introducing a financing option has been a wild ride in our association world.
What is the most important skill you’ve acquired at AffiniPay?
Listening to others’ needs is one of the most important skills I’ve acquired on the job, which has never been more valuable than during the pandemic. Staying connected to our partners became more critical than ever and, very quickly, our check-in calls became video chats. In addition to business conversations they also felt like a therapy session for both sides. We discussed fears and struggles and in these honest conversations we also brainstormed ways to support each other. No one is treated like a number or has to navigate an internal phone tree to get an answer. Our entire team, including our CEO and leadership, is involved and ready to help.
Our CLE department launched free virtual continuing ed courses for associations every Friday. We also sponsored creative virtual events, from trivia to virtual concerts, to support our partners, even if it meant me dressing up like an ‘80s rocker to emcee. Associations needed support, so we were there. It has been rough for everyone and I wouldn’t have gotten through it without the support of my partners. I’m so thankful for our long and ever-growing connection.
What role were first hired for at SamCart?
I joined SamCart as a sales development representative. While in this role, my responsibility was to reach out to prospective customers via phone, email and other avenues to qualify and set sales meetings with account executives. I also engaged with customers through our live chat feature by answering questions and selling our plans and products. Lastly, I hosted online demonstrations of the SamCart platform to customers who wanted to learn more.
What role are you in now?
Currently I am an SMB outbound account executive. Before my time at SamCart, I had zero experience in the e-commerce industry. But I did have sales experience coming in, so there was a slight learning curve that I needed to overcome. With the help of a great team and supportive sales leaders, I was able to learn everything I needed to as fast as possible, which led to a promotion in a little more than three months.
We just concluded an “Affiliate Launch,” which was the first launch I’ve worked on. Seeing the time and effort every team member puts into these types of events is incredible. Seeing how successful the launch was is even better.
How has SamCart supported your career growth throughout this journey?
SamCart has helped me learn the industry. The onboarding was very easy to digest and it was easy to learn about the product. Our sales leaders are always there to answer my questions and to host any training sessions if needed. Supportive team members have also had a huge impact on my development, and I continue to learn from them firsthand how to become successful at SamCart.
Open communication between teams is something else that has been helpful, as issues can be resolved faster or questions answered quicker. Overall, the learning opportunities, support and communication have helped my career progress faster than I ever expected. I can’t wait for the future as I continue to grow with SamCart.
What role were first hired for at REX?
I was hired into a business development role where I worked for about three weeks. I quickly pivoted into marketing and real estate transactions where I helped with property-level marketing initiatives to increase occupancy rates and resident retention as well as coordinated new property takeover transitions.
What role are you in now?
I am currently working in HR operations. I’ve had the opportunity to take ownership over various projects and initiatives and have been given the opportunity to explore different career paths and find my niche. My journey has been untraditional but exciting, which is my preference. In order to be successful at a startup, you need to be able to embrace the chaos. Being adaptive to new challenges is imperative.
I’ve had the opportunity to be on every team in the company: real estate transactions, marketing, business development, recruiting and now human resources. Rex really supports and encourages you to step outside of your expertise and learn a new domain. You are also given an incredible amount of autonomy, which ultimately necessitates growth, creativity and collaboration.
How has Rex supported your career growth throughout this journey?
Being at Rex has given me the chance to lean into my strengths while also being able to flex new muscles: strategy, marketing, team-building and more. I’m never going to be siloed in one specific project or role, and being able to explore a new area of interest and work with teammates with varying degrees of experience and expertise provides an incredible learning opportunity.
I’ve developed so many new skills through mentorship from our incredible talent. Also, being at Rex and watching something being built has given me a holistic view of the company’s key initiatives and priorities for each area of the business.
