# Culture
# Strategy
# Team Structure
# ELC Annual 2022
Cash App’s engineering team has historically had a very bottom-up culture where teams are chartered with constraints and goals, and are empowered to achieve those goals however they choose. And while we share a lot of technical foundations, such as service containers, frameworks, common/shared infrastructure, tooling & developer experience, teams may choose to adopt different tools, vendors, technologies, architecture or programming languages & paradigms if this allows them to achieve their goals more quickly or efficiently.
However, while this approach has allowed us to build a successful business, as we’ve grown in scale to almost 1,000 engineers, it has started to show signs of failure, and manifests as overchoice, confusion, redundancy, and lack of leverage.
In this presentation we will walk you through some of the history of Cash App’s engineering team, how we developed the culture that we have, our successes, and the unique challenges that this causes. We’ll talk about how we’re approaching solving them with a high level of engagement & alignment across our entire engineering team.
Tom Adams & Tess Winlock · Jan 27th, 2023