Disclaimer: This is a tech's person perspective
Even though it's a startup/scale-up, the business has very traditional managerial style. There's a team of "principals", that have created the core products of the company early on, and they usually call all the shots. The codebase, even though it's a micro service architecture with new technologies (Spring Boot 3 with JDK 21), is a bit of a mess. Poorly written, horrible design, and poor test coverage. Widespread fire fighting.
It's a demotivating because little to no effort is being put into fixing the core issues of the code.
Added that the initial design created by the "principals" was clearly poor (as it happens when you're doing things for the first time), the company hired a bunch of contractors from India that are very low skilled. For every bug they fix, they create 3 others. As time went on, what was already bad just got worse and worse.
Engineering managers usually have no clue what's going on, their role has no purpose other than schedule meeting and ask how you're doing.
Delivery managers are the whips of the company making sure everyone is doing their tickets and tracking progress. Tech leadership overall is non existent.
There's a handful of people committed to the company and with great intentions, but I think their efforts is wasted due to the lack of good leadership and practices. Just creating agile ceremonies that nobody wants to attend or see any benefit in them, doesn't guarantee good outcomes. The company is very driven to follow "the corporate playbook" other than practical results (unlike startups)
Most of the work you will do is not engaging, just fixing bugs and small changes that will not make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. The interesting work the principals take to themselves, and the rest of the paws just go about their day in the "assembly line" of endless jira tickets.
Last but not least, they are slowing requiring more office attendance. What started as once a quarter, became once a month, now it's once a week, and will soon be twice a week. Even though in the tech teams half of the people are in India and we won't be seeing them anyway, we go to the office to do the same zoom meetings we do at home.
