Culture

At Endowus, we believe that “growth” is multidimensional. At its core, growth is defined by increased levels of ownership and impact. It isn’t just about changing your job title. Real growth happens when you take on end-to-end ownership of a product feature, when you master a new functional domain (like pension schemes or private markets), or when you learn to architect systems that can handle millions of dollars in transactions without flinching. It happens through mentoring peers and collaborating across teams. Of course, clear career progression is a vital part of that picture. We want every engineer to know where they stand and what the next step looks like. One of the most common questions we get is: “Do I have to become a manager to grow?” The answer is No.

Shernice Sng is a Year 3 Computer Science undergraduate at the National University of Singapore who recently completed a summer internship with the Endowus engineering team. Over the past summer, I had the privilege of joining Endowus as a Software Engineer Intern. For three months, I contributed to meaningful projects, learned from talented colleagues, and grew both professionally and personally.

In an earlier post, we shared how we think about Engineering Values at Endowus and how they guide our decision making. In this post, we will share some instances where we applied these values in real scenarios. By the way, we also covered this topic in a talk titled “From Theory to Practice: How Engineering Values Inform Technology Decisions,” at APIdays Singapore 2023. The complete talk can be viewed on YouTube.

Hello! I’m Amelia Tay, a third-year undergraduate studying Information Systems at the Singapore Management University and I’ve spent my past 5 months with Endowus as a mobile engineering intern. Taking my last week here to reflect on these past few months has made me realise how pivotal of a role Endowus has played in my personal growth. So here I am, hoping to share with you how that came to be!

There have been many attempts at defining the culture of an organisation. Some claim culture stems from a company’s vision and mission. Others think it’s about perks and benefits. We think the best articulation of what constitutes a company’s culture is found in Ben Horowitz’s book “What You Do Is Who You Are”, in which he writes: Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you are not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. This rubric of decision making can be captured as that which a company values. As individual contributors, and later as engineering leaders at many different companies, we’ve witnessed first-hand how engineering teams make choices and decisions that are influenced by these cultural values. Every company, every department, and every team has values. Whether they realise it or not and whether they explicitly write them down or not - they exist and are the invisible force guiding employee behaviours and decision making.