Posit

CREATING OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR FREE.99👩🏽‍💻🎉

People all over the world are turning to R, Python, and other open-source programming languages, to make sense of data.
Posit’s mission is to create free open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication. We do this to enhance the production and consumption of knowledge by everyone, regardless of economic means, and to facilitate collaboration and reproducible research, both of which are critical to the integrity and efficacy of work in science, education, government, and industry.

Posit also produces Posit Team, a modular platform of commercial software products that give organizations the confidence to adopt R, Python, and other open-source data science software at scale – along with online services to make learning easier and use them over the web.

Together, Posit’s open-source and commercial software form a virtuous cycle: The adoption of open-source data science software at scale in organizations creates demand for Posit’s commercial software; the revenue from commercial software, in turn, enables deeper investment in the open-source software that benefits everyone.

Posit is dedicated to using the power of business to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy. We believe that corporations should be run for the benefit of all stakeholders, employees, customers, and the community at large. Consequently, we are a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) and a Certified B Corporation®. Our open-source mission is codified into our charter, and our corporate decisions must balance the interests of the community, customers, employees, and shareholders.

We utilize the non-profit B Lab®’s “Impact Assessment,” a rigorous assessment of a company’s impact on its workers, customers, community, and environment. Further details are available in our annual public benefit report and B Lab’s impact score.

OUR FOUNDATIONAL VALUES💛

Open: We’re committed to building open-source tools and a working environment that works for everyone. We’re welcoming, inquisitive and curious.

Resourceful: We’re creative problem-solvers: experienced practitioners with applied expertise. We continuously examine our assumptions and make space to learn from both our wins and mistakes.

Generous: We communicate kindly and support each other. We believe business and community can work together to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

Lasting: We’re committed, authentic, and act with integrity. We take the long-term perspective. We want our work to continue to positively impact the world 100+ years from now.

OUR DEFINITION OF DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION💪🏾🌈👨‍👩‍👦👨🏻‍🦽

We define and value diversity as the presence of differences within our team. We measure our diversity (based on race/ethnicity, gender, age, and other demographic factors) because our mission is to create products for anyone, anywhere, to use for free—and it is essential that the composition of our organization reflects the diversity of our users. We are committed to building tools that work for everyone.

We believe that equity is different than equality. Simply treating everyone equally ignores the fact that we don’t all start from the same place or face the same hurdles in our path. Equity is important to us as it is a fundamental human value.

Here at Posit, equity means that we are committed to ‘leveling the playing field,’ working to ensure every team member has the same access to resources, connections, and opportunities needed to succeed. We are committed to creating a company culture and decision-making process that reflects our dedication to equity.

Inclusivity is the extent to which our team members, employees, and community members feel a sense of belonging, safety, and value within our organization. At Posit, we know it’s not enough to recruit people; in order for everyone to do their best work and reach their full potential, they need to feel they belong when they join.

Another key to inclusivity is creating psychological safety within our organization through our values and leadership approach. We use inclusive meeting facilitation practices to ensure all voices are heard and give space in our 1:1s for feedback to managers. Inclusivity is where we start in creating an equitable workplace that supports and develops diverse talent.

How we practice inclusivity:

Here at Posit, we know that families come in all different sizes and structures, and we offer healthcare based on individual households and dependents rather than marital status or other traditional family definitions. We offer gender-neutral paid parental leave for adoptive, foster, and birth parents. Gender-affirming healthcare is covered within our healthcare plan as well as coverage, including mental health care, for the entire family.

We have a flexible paid time off policy and encourage everyone on the team to take at least four weeks per year so people can take the time they need away from work to care for themselves and their loved ones.

We understand that each person’s work-from-home life is different. We offer a home office allowance for employees to create a productive, comfortable remote workspace. We also provide monthly co-working space stipends and an open door to our Boston office for employees in the local area who seek to work outside their homes.

We are working to make our company events accessible to all. As a fully remote company, all in-person events are optional for people who can’t attend for any reason. We are continually striving to create spaces where everyone can fully participate regardless of their ability to attend in person.

We value the individuality of each team member and encourage them to share their feedback, questions, and concerns.

OUR CODE OF CONDUCT & SAFETY PRACTICES🔖

Code of conduct – Posit is committed to fostering a productive, harassment-free working experience for everyone. We expect everyone at Posit to contribute to a welcoming, civil, safe, and tolerant environment. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Our managers are trained to report all forms of harassment to the People Ops team (or beyond if appropriate) so we can help ensure that issues are documented and addressed appropriately.

Anti-harassment training – Beyond simply meeting our legal obligations, providing training on what constitutes harassment and what each of us can do to maintain a safe, respectful, and equitable environment is critical. We know that many corporate anti-harassment trainings can be awkward and ineffective, which is why we partner with Ethena, a company that focuses on relevant, timely, evidence-based training. This training is continuous throughout employment to keep the content top of mind.

Culture of learning – At Posit, we continuously examine our assumptions and look for ways to improve ourselves. We know mistakes happen, and it is important that our teams can be honest about their mistakes without fear of negative repercussions so we can continue to build a culture of learning. Mistakes often create awareness so that we can all learn and grow.

Representation – We partner with organizations that focus on hiring underrepresented talent in tech (She+ Geeks Out, Tech Ladies, Remotewomen, BTP) and Startup Recruiting Bootcamp with a focus on DEIA in recruiting for recruiters and hiring managers. We strive to create a team that reflects the diversity of our users.

Organizational justice – Organizational justice refers to employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace. One way we approach this is through our AMAs with leadership and PeopleOps, where people can anonymously surface areas of concern and discuss them.

In our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Council meetings, we start each meeting with ‘what have you been hearing’ so we can discuss challenges Council members have identified as well as things they’ve been hearing from people in their communities or departments.

As an organization, we are working to improve our career framework and create more clarity in career ladders so that there is high visibility into advancement to ensure fairness in employment opportunities.

Respect/Trust/Psychological safety – Leadership seeks out and participates in workshops about creating psychologically safe workplaces for employees and encourages employees to voice concerns without fear of negative repercussions.

We know that each person on our team brings unique and valuable perspectives to the company. We strive to create safe spaces for people to bring their concerns to leadership in Ask Me Anything meetings with anonymous questions through sli.do and welcome feedback. Employees are trusted to use their time as they see fit.

Transparency in processes – As a business, we strive to be open about how we make decisions. We intentionally share thought processes behind things like pay philosophy, hiring approach, company vision, and challenges we may be facing as a business. As a business, we strive to be transparent about how we make decisions and encourage feedback. Listening to our teams helps us build a resilient, thriving, healthy organization.

A general climate of kindness – We intentionally hire thoughtful, kind, and empathetic people and are committed to addressing whatever issues we need to to ensure every team has what they need to grow and thrive.

Acceptance – We offer gender-neutral paid parental leave for adoptive foster and birth parents. Gender-affirming healthcare is covered within our healthcare plan, and we have a flexible paid time off policy. We also encourage everyone on the team to take at least four weeks for PTO to care for themselves.

We know that not everyone can travel, and as a fully remote company, all in-person events are optional for people who can’t attend for any reason. We are working to find ways for those who can only attend virtually to feel included through other modalities of connection.

For our company-wide work weeks, we are actively looking for hotels that are accessibility-friendly as well as open to our request for gender-neutral bathrooms. We want all to feel seen, heard, and welcomed.

We have channels on Slack where people can share what is happening in their lives and get support from colleagues. As a fully remote company, it is important to us to have spaces where people can build community and friendships.

WHAT CURRENT & FUTURE TEAMMATES CAN EXPECT FROM LEADERSHIP 🤝

Health/Happiness:
Leadership values connecting with our employees at all levels. To effectively do so, we provide space to voice concerns or questions (anonymously if needed) during our Ask Me Anything meetings, employee surveys, and open office hours. Our DEIA Council is also there to support employees with their concerns. We want our employees to feel safe to share their experiences so we can continue to create a welcoming and productive workplace culture together.

Posit is intentionally 100% distributed; we trust our employees to do their job the best way they see fit from wherever they are in the world. We know people do their best work when they can structure their days around their lives.

We know inclusive, people-centered benefits are essential. Our benefits include gender-affirming healthcare, gender-neutral paid parental leave for birth, foster, and adoptive parents, and mental health care for employees and their families.

The financial well-being of our employees is a priority which is why we have a profit-sharing bonus, a long-term incentive plan, and allow people to contribute to our 401K from day one with an employer match that starts after six months. We regularly focus on enhancing benefit offerings and know that caring for our team is one way we can create a sustainable business that is successful 100 years from now.

Career and goals:
At Posit, we are building processes for on-the-job learning and encourage promotions from within the company. We have a learning & development budget for training, certifications, conferences, coaching, and ongoing offerings to enhance management abilities, including feedback, career development, and job design. We are creating a career framework structure so that employees can see a clear trajectory for career growth, and we continue to build systems that support ongoing, meaningful feedback.

BEING ACTIONABLE & ACCESSIBLE IS AT OUR CORE🛣

Because our mission is to create products for anyone, anywhere, to use for free, it is essential that the composition of our organization reflects the diversity of our users. We will continue to strive to build more diverse and inclusive teams, especially within our leadership.

We are committed to building tools and a working environment that works for everyone. We want everyone to feel valued, in and outside our virtual walls.

As a business with an open source core, we are fundamentally open and work to provide access to all. Open source software can be exclusionary, however, because of the social structure of some of these projects and the need for free time to work on open source.
We counter some of these open source narratives by paying people to work on open source software, offering paid mentorship and internship opportunities, and a developing fellowship program.

Our open source packages have Codes of Conduct and governance models, and the leadership on our packages – including the tidyverse, R Markdown, and Shiny—model inclusivity and create space for a welcoming community. We consider the work around the software—documentation, books, community, learning resources—as fundamental as the software itself for onboarding more people to work with and contribute to open source software for data science.

Our goal is data science for everyone, and we empower users, support the ecosystem and build tools to support data science from beginning to end. We develop and maintain more than 240 R packages, with more than 66,000,000 downloads in just the last month. People around the world use our software to answer the questions that are important to them and address challenges in science and society.

INTERVIEW PROCESS 📋

At Posit, our core philosophy is that recruiting is about people and relationships. We work to create recruiting and hiring processes that are consistent, inclusive, flexible, and minimize bias to ensure that we help find the right fit for each candidate to continue growing their careers.

We try to keep the entire interview process between 3-5 interviews and minimize paired interviewers because we know, as a candidate, interviewing with more than one person at a time can be unnerving. Aside from the initial recruiter screen, we ensure all your conversations are with people you’ll be working with directly.

1. Recruiter screen: (30 minutes, phone) During this call, we’re looking to briefly learn about your background and experience and what you’re looking to do next. We will also tell you more about Posit and answer any questions you may have.

2. Hiring manager screen: (1 hour, Zoom) Here, we will have an in-depth conversion about the job, the day-to-day, and what the team is working towards. This is also where candidates will get to talk, in detail, about their work experience.

3. Assignment: (Up to 2 hours, for technical roles only) This short assignment is structured to replicate what it’s like to work here. We give people the option to participate in an independent take-home assignment or a working partnership assignment via Zoom.

4. Panel: (1 hour each, Zoom) This is where you meet the team and have 1 to 1 conversations with the people you’ll be working with.

BENEFITS💰

• We offer competitive compensation with extensive human-first, people-focused benefits to prioritize your personal and financial well-being.

• 100% of medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums are covered for employees and their families! Fertility and gender-affirming healthcare is included in all of our plans.

• Supplemental mental health and wellness benefits are available via Ginger even if you don’t opt into our insurance plans, including Ginger for teen family members.

• Posit’s gender-neutral paid parental leave policy covers all new parents, including foster and adoptive parents.

• Our 401k matches up to 50% of the maximum employee contribution after six months.

• An annual profit-sharing bonus for employees recognizes our team’s contributions to company performance across the year.

• As a long-term incentive, all new hires receive a cash grant as part of their offer. We chose cash over stock options to give a clearer sense of expected earnings and a low-risk retention-driven program that fits with our intent to build a stable and sustainable organization where everyone is driven by the work and the mission of Posit (rather than the price of our stock).

• We are a 100% distributed team. You are also welcome to come to our Boston office.

• Our remote office allowance includes:
  $1000 home office allowance plus an additional $800 for equipment
  Up to $400 monthly reimbursement for coworking space rental

• We provide a flexible environment with a generous vacation policy that encourages a minimum of four weeks PTO per year plus 13 paid company holidays.