Pros
Before I discuss some of the technical reasons why Backtrace was a great place to work, I'd like to first mention something that I feel shows some real integrity on the part of Samy and Abel and the company as a whole; 4 months after I began working at Backtrace my father was diagnosed with a very rare terminal cancer. I became his biggest support, and Backtrace literally worked with me every step of the way and helped support ME throughout the duration of my fathers illness, meaning they would carry extra weight when I was unable to attend work because my father was in and out of hospitals and emergency rooms for a year and then some. Additionally there were times when I needed to work part-time, and at one point I took a 2 months leave of absence. Whatever my delicate needs were... Samy and Abel thoughtfully worked to come up with innovative solutions in an extremely difficult situation. Had I been working somewhere else, its very possible that I would not have been able to spend all of the time helping my father, while still keeping employment due to the compassion and understanding of the people at the company (Who are some stellar people to work with). From a technical standpoint: Backtrace hand-picks the most brilliant engineers, some are generalists, some are specialists. I for instance specialized in computer security and binary analysis. If you are senior Prepare to be given freedom to maintain and innovate your own components in this amazing product that has already raised the bar for bringing debugging technologies to the next level. The work is expansive and gives developers the opportunity to work on a very large range of problems that are exciting to solve and require research in some cases to solve problems that have never been done. Much of the open source components that are being used have been patched and optimized and made better for community as a whole upstream. The culture includes ping pong, video games and special evenings where everyone gets together to hang out and just have fun. The owners of the company are both very adept engineers and thought leaders in a variety of areas from HPC to state-of-the-art debugging technologies. Backtrace accomidated me on many levels and I learned a bunch working there. If you're a serious software engineer who's interested in working on some of the most interesting problems, I highly recommend Backtrace.
Cons
I actually didn't have any issues with the company.