Atrium Blog

Atrium | Product Design Manager | San Francisco, CA | Full-time, Onsite | https://www.atrium.co/

Atrium is reinventing the way legal services are delivered by combining modern technology and operational efficiency to deliver fast, transparent, and price predictable legal and business services to high-growth companies. We’re based in San Francisco and have $75.5M in funding from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Greylock, First Round Capital, and more.

As our first Product Design Manager, you’ll enable design to be one of Atrium’s competitive advantages. You’ll act as both a player and a coach as you mentor and manage product designers, while also ensuring that design process and patterns scale across teams and products.

You will lead Atrium’s Product Design team by establishing a strong design culture and high standards of craftsmanship that are reflected in all of our products. You will also get to build your own, top notch design team by recruiting exceptional design talent and mentoring our talented team of designers. You’ll be a senior design leader, but will also have to know when to be an individual contributor. We’re a small team and this role will require research, wireframing, prototyping, and assisting our design team as necessary

I'd love to connect if this sounds interesting. Check out our careers page for all job openings and to apply directly.

Feel free to email me at nathalie.pretzer@atrium.com and connect with…

Justin Kan has a great post that is equally critical of startup compensation and management. He also makes positive points in favor of startups: as opportunities for non-FAANG candidates, for learning faster and (to some people) as a gateway to starting your own company.

https://www.atrium.co/blog/work-at-a-startup/

In line with Justin's post, learning has been a key motivating factor throughout my career. In particular, working at startups has given me better insight to the business that drives the company. I've sat on calls with sales people to understand customer asks vs. needs, and I've developed strategy alongside BD teams for driving adoption of technical platforms. For engineers who are interested in learning more about other functions/roles at a company (product, business development, sales), startups are sometimes flatter and can offer more exposure.

(That said, you can also get non-eng exposure/experience in larger companies. You may have to take a non-traditional eng role, such as sales engineering, partner engineering or developer advocacy. There are some perceived downsides of that path -- sometimes around compensation or building your core "engineering skill set" -- but it's a viable option.)

Ex-Facebook. After five years I found my pace of learning had basically plateaued. Combine with organizational politics at any large company and I started looking for something smaller.

Ended up at Atrium, a legal startup in SF. Similar to mtlynch, I didn't expect how much I'd have to hone my front-end chops on leaving a FAANG.

Getting the opportunity to learn what I hadn't been learning and shore up those weaknesses reenforce my decision to switch.

Best parts so far:

* It's 30x smaller than FB was when I joined and 300x smaller than FB was when I left.

* Great people abound. I was worried that this wouldn't be the case at a smaller company but I joined partly on the basis of how intellectually curious the engineers I met were during my interview.

* It's a non-traditional tech company. We work with attorneys and build domain expertise in the problems CEOs and VCs face every day. The hard legal problems of starting a business.

If any of that sounds interesting, we're hiring! Reach out to username at gmail or https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings

This too.

I've worked for startups a few years now, and as many HN commenters here have said, you WILL have many bad days. You'll see crazy shit once in a while, so it's almost always easier to answer your question by starting with why NOT to join a startup.

Justin Kan has a good writeup on this: https://www.atrium.co/blog/work-at-a-startup/

Read it, and then read it a second time. On your second pass, put more thought on the "what if the startup fails", as one tends to overestimate the upside (riches etc.) without weighing out the downside of the risks involved. Unless you feel "yes, this is what I sign up for" very strongly, you probably shouldn't.

Just to wrap this point up, here's why I'm where I'm at. I've "roughly" figured out something I can live with in my career. Working in a big company with big bureaucracy, slow processes and being told to do something insignificant kills me, and I'm better off working at startups and hopefully start something my own later on, despite the potential downsides.

https://www.atrium.co/inside-atrium/the-future-of-atrium/

For someone who has spent so much telling founders to cut buzzwords and speak in plain and simple English, this blog post by Justin Kan is something special. Case in point:

> Similarly, at Atrium, we’ve made the tough decision to restructure the company to accommodate growth into new business services through our existing professional services network.

Simple facts hidden in positive-sounding buzzwords, as if, they believe that the reader doesn't know better. It seems like a variation of 'Our incredible journey..' template

Honest question, why do companies do this? It seems disrespectful to everyone - employees (both fired and current), customers, and any adult for that matter.

Atrium (YC W18) | San Francisco | https://www.atrium.co

Atrium is a data-driven law firm designed to make access to corporate legal services transparent and price-predictable for everyone. We're doing this by building the first structured data platform for organizational data. We use modern techniques for extracting data that is locked away in legal documents, modeling how best to store this information, and inventing new ways for lawyers and paralegals to interact with the resulting structured data to help advise clients.

- All Open Roles: https://www.atrium.co/careers/
- Engineering Roles: https://www.atrium.co/engineering/
- Legal Roles: https://jobs.lever.co/atrium?department=Atrium&team=Legal