Incredible environment to grow and thrive - AI Growth Lead Stride Consulting Employee Review

Stride Consulting is a team of forward-looking engineers who are doing the type of work that is defining an entire generation. I'm six months into my role at Stride, and I've spent 23 years in this industry leading up to this role so I've seen a lot of cultures. Stride stands out. A few things that genuinely work here: Compensation is strong. They pay people what they're worth, which sounds basic but isn't a given. Leadership actually wants the feedback. Input and criticism aren't just tolerated, they're requested on a consistent basis. That changes how you show up to work. Remote is real, not tolerated. A large portion of the team is remote, and the culture is built around that, not retrofitted to it. There's real intentionality around making distributed employees feel part of the whole. Personal growth is part of the DNA. We're a technology firm, and the expectation is that our people are on the forefront of what's new. That mindset filters through the organization. You're set up to do your best work. Stride puts you in a position where your talents are on display, and they want you to feel like a winner when you deliver excellent work.

With a distributed team, you can't always grab the person you need in the kitchen. Sometimes you have to be patient and use Slack the way it was meant to be used. Not really a knock on Stride - more a tradeoff of how modern work happens.

The eng culture is solid. People pair a lot, do TDD, and care about writing good code even while working with Claude Code, etc. No vibe coding. Plus engineers here help each other out with AI tools for coding, its not like you have to figure everything out alone which is helpful. Also recently I've shipped a bunch of agentic AI systems into production which still feels rare and cool.

Mixing consulting with constantly changing AI and high pressure moments makes it challenging.