Beware of toxic micromanagement and sexism - Anonymous employee Lambda Employee Review

1.0
9 Feb 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- The people who are executing on the ground level are great humans who are smart and collaborative. - The pay was good (at or slightly above market rate). - Work/life balance was good.

Cons

When I was interviewing at Lambda, I was told they were scaling the company for major growth. Unfortunately, this was not the case. My experience was they are running a 100+ person company as if it were still a 10 person startup. I’ll stick to the facts that I wished I had known before I joined: 1. The CEO and CTO are twin brothers who started the company together. Together, they make every meaningful decision and everyone else must execute their vision or be fired. They often bicker in meetings and it’s very uncomfortable. 2. During my time there, there was zero women or people of color on the engineering team, out of 30+ people. There are very few women in managerial or leadership roles. 3. There are only a handful of people of color at the company (maybe 10-12% if I’m being generous). 4. The CEO recently re-structured the product team so that he would be the lead and run every decision on product. As part of this re-structure, the head of product and two other product team members were terminated without notice or cause. The rationale the CEO gave the company was that he is a machine learning engineer so “he is the customer and the product”. 5. The CTO is the only person who approves code before it goes live. This is a huge bottleneck.

Explore other reviews about Lambda

5.0
14 Jan 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Comp is excellent Strong, high-trust culture Teammates are excellent

Cons

401k match is so-so Hiring has recently mostly been for the Bay Area

1.0
8 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lambda pays above market salaries and has a good benefits package relative to other pre-IPO businesses that are out there. There are pockets of good people who genuinely believe in the mission and do good work, though those are few and far between to be honest. The work life balance is really good and if you're on the right team you can make a lot per hour to ship absolutely nothing of value since there is little if any oversight to actually doing your job. If you're in a place in your career where you want to rest and vest because you have a family or a lot of hobbies outside of work this is about as good as it comes.

Cons

If you're an organized and ambitious professional who wants to operate at a high performance level and be around peers that do the same this will be hell for you and you'll probably be lied to during the interview panel about how awesome everyone is. You will not be able to do anything to move the needle forward on things that drive results without attaching yourself politically to folks that are a part of the inner circle since everything is incredibly top down driven. The company is so politically messy that everything takes 5x longer than what you'd be able to do at a less chaotic organization. The CEO and CTO are probably the worst I have ever seen in my decade plus career yet refuse to follow the boards instructions to get professional management help. I'm ashamed to say I work for these leaders. I'd estimate that over half of the company is on the spectrum and if you're in a customer facing or adjacent role it takes an incredibly amount of effort and feather ruffling to shield the customer from the nightmare that is Lambda. There will be many times where you'll be utterly embarrassed to be an employee at the company and you'll get gaslit into things being improved but they never will. Please do yourself a favor and do not work here.

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