On her second day at Loop, before she'd finished setting up her laptop, Hannah Tan was handed a real ticket.
She had come from finance, with one prior internship and no full-time engineering experience, and she expected her first week to look like traditional onboarding: videos, forms, getting the repo running. Instead there was actual work in front of her almost immediately. "I was surprised I was given tickets my first, second day," she told me. By day three she was giving updates in standup on real work, alongside an onboarding buddy who sat with her well past 6pm explaining concepts he was sometimes still learning himself.
I'm not an engineer. I work in Marketing. But when I sat down with Justin and Hannah Tan, another Senior Software Engineer, to talk about how they'd grown at Loop, that story stuck with me. Not only did I relate because I’d done something similar with our website in my early days, because it's also a fantastic metaphor for our entire conversation.
Growing at Loop means getting trusted early, stretching, and having people around to support you. Then it happens again, with bigger stakes, until the engineer who was nervous to touch anything in week one is the one others now come to for help.
It starts on day one
Hannah’s first week could have been extremely daunting. But reflecting back she told me that what made it exciting was that no one expected her to do it alone. She described her onboarding buddy, Will, sitting with her well past 6pm, patiently explaining concepts he was sometimes still learning himself. Justin described the same thing from his side. "People are willing to help out and sit down with the problems I have and work through them," he said.
Hannah recalled a specific project that she attributes to her accelerated growth at Loop. Last year she worked on a project called “audit unbundling,” which established Loop’s automation for generating expected charges for audits. “This was by far the largest project I've owned. Replacing a manual process that had stopped scaling with the business due to its dependency on our operations headcount. It was challenging from both a technical and non-technical perspective,” she recalled.
Given the scope of the project, she had to reconcile ideas from the product and engineering teams while managing expectations for our stakeholders and the end users on our operations team. On the technical side, she had to grapple with state and lifecycle management to prevent a single input change from rippling through versioning issues downstream.
But she didn’t just leave it there. When bugs surfaced after launch, she stayed in direct contact with the ops team for months through rollout. “Being on call for my own work turned out to be the fastest feedback loop I've had: every bug I triaged taught me something about the system I'd designed, and a few of them changed how I built the phases that came next. By the end, they were bringing me edge cases before they became bugs.”
You outgrow the guardrails
Loop creates that environment deliberately to empower fast growth. You get real responsibility years before you might elsewhere, and it comes wrapped in enough support that the stretch feels like an opportunity rather than an unmanageable weight. The work is genuinely hard, and sometimes the imposter syndrome makes it feel a little scary. But it's also, from the way both of them lit up remembering it, genuinely fun.
As you settle in, the work starts to change shape. The early work was well-structured, Justin said, tasks with a relatively clear path. Then it opened up. "Now here are more unstructured tasks and more ambiguous things, where no one really knows what the best choice is, and it's your job to think through the trade-offs."
His first real taste of that was writing an engineering requirements doc. He remembers that it was uncomfortable at first. What closed the gap between hard and easy wasn't just time. It was the support around him while he repeated it. He'd write one, get feedback, and his managers and teammates would work through the trade-offs with him rather than leaving him to sink. Do that enough times he told me, “you look back and realize you can do it easily now.” That distance, between the thing that once intimidated you and what's now second nature, is what fast growth looks like.
The title follows
At a lot of companies, you're waiting on a calendar or a headcount plan before you're allowed to think about a promotion. At Loop the mechanism is simpler: you raise your hand, you prove you can handle something on a small scale, and it expands from there. When there's a real need in the business and you've shown you can meet it, Loop doesn't hesitate to make it official, and it tends to happen fast. Nobody is asking you to carry more than you're equipped for, and you're supported and recognized for it the whole way.
That was how Hannah described her experience. After her first promotion, she wasn't just responsible for her own work anymore. She wrote the tickets for herself and for a more junior engineer, and coordinated across teams with ops. She became the point of contact, and she remembered feeling the weight of that responsibility. "There's a channel for your project, and people tag you on bugs, tag you on questions, tag you on new onboarding," she said.
What struck me was how much she grew to relish it. At first the responsibility was nervewracking. But every demo she presented, every bug she fielded, every tight feedback loop with ops that let her fix something and see it land, added a little more confidence than the week before. Loop builds that visibility in on purpose through weekly demos, where you present your work to the team. That means understanding it deeply enough to stand behind it, and it means getting real credit for what you've built. “It was nerve-wracking and rewarding at the same time,” Hannah said. Eventually she wasn't bracing for the responsibility, she was proud of it.
That's what ownership looks like at Loop: real scope and real visibility, early, with the support and recognition that turn weight into pride.
And because the work keeps expanding, the ceiling stays out of reach. When I asked both Justin and Hannah about their friends’ experiences at other companies and how it compared to theirs at Loop, the contrast was enlightening. Justin’s friend recently joined a bigger company on a team that owns one narrow slice of one product. The work is stable, but his growth is bounded by that slice, and in a quiet maintenance phase there aren't enough new problems to push him further. "His growth will always be confined to that one product," Justin said.
At Loop the opposite is true: you can raise your hand, propose something you think matters, and watch it get slotted into the sprint. There's no slice to plateau on, just an expanding frontier of things no one has built yet, which means there's always another level to grow into.
Our unique support system
There's one more ingredient that’s unique at Loop. Ask almost anyone here, on any team, what makes it different, and they’ll all say the same thing: the people.
I would argue that Loop has a type. The people that thrive here are driven, self-sufficient, hardworking, and genuinely passionate. Normally you have one or two people like that in a department, but having a whole team of them, across the entire org, is not something I've personally seen anywhere else in my career. It genuinely changes what your workday feels like. When the bar around you is high and everybody is passionate and speaking with wide eyes, it’s inspiring. It pushes you to work harder and rise to the occasion.
That could easily tip into pressure. But what keeps it energizing is that the same people who set the bar are the ones patient enough to help you clear it. Hannah described being handed something that felt like it should go to someone more senior, and then having the support that let her rise to meet it. When talent and generosity come together, it’s something special.
Justin called the support system the single biggest factor in his growth. He was quick to say the engineers here are extraordinary and that it rubs off. But couple that with the fact that everyone was approachable. He could always sit down with someone, talk through what he was stuck on, and see how they approached the same problem.
That's how the level of the whole team keeps climbing. Everyone is being pulled up by the people beside them, and then turning around to do the same for whoever comes in next.
The feedback Loop
Both Justin and Hannah earned their titles. But what I’m proud to be writing about was everything the titles represent.
You trust people with real work early. You give them problems a little beyond their reach. And you surround them with colleagues patient enough to help, and sharp enough to inspire and motivate beyond that moment. Then you do it again. Repeat that enough, and the person who needed catching becomes the one doing the catching.
If you like the way we support growth here at Loop, check out our careers page and apply today.
