Being a working mom is hard. But at Squarespace, it doesn’t have to be.

As the leading all-in-one web publishing platform, Squarespace empowers people with creative ideas to succeed — and that goes for both their customers and their employees. Take Polina Giralt, a data engineer who started working at Squarespace in 2016. During her job search, Polina looked for companies with high-growth, high-learning environments where she could expand her skills, influence technology direction, and make a major engineering contribution. Squarespace fit the bill.

She also happened to be seven months pregnant at the time, so parental leave benefits and work/life flexibility were top of mind. Again, Squarespace came through. “Before accepting their offer, I sat down with the hiring manager to make sure we were on the same page regarding expectations before, during, and after my leave,” Polina said. “I left that conversation feeling supported and signed the offer.”

She started at Squarespace as an individual contributor on the Data Engineering team and after a year (which included a completely unplugged 18-week maternity leave), she got a promotion. In her current role as Senior Engineer and Team Lead, she spends her days writing code, improving processes, mentoring others, and prioritizing work for the two teams she manages: Marketing Data Engineering and Product Data Engineering. She’s also mom to a two-year-old and a newborn.

Despite how demanding her career and motherhood are, she’s been able to achieve work/life balance thanks to Squarespace’s understanding culture. “We have an incredibly supportive environment, particularly for parents,” said Molly Saint, who sits on the People Team at Squarespace. “From our robust benefits offerings to our generous parental leave, we have enough mechanisms that allow parents to keep family a number one priority.”

For Polina, one of those mechanisms has been the ability to work from home one day a week since having her first child. But the flexibility doesn’t end there – Squarespace offers unlimited PTO for employees in addition to flexible working hours. “A month or two after coming back from my first maternity leave, when sleep deprivation was getting to me, my manager offered to switch my WFH Wednesdays to PTO Wednesdays,” Polina remembers. “I never took him up on the offer, but it made me feel better knowing that it was an option.”

At the end of the day, Polina always knew that she wanted to have a career and be a mom, and she’s been able to do both in her role at Squarespace. And, the company is indeed empowering her to succeed. “After 10+ years in my career, I’ve learned that I really enjoy focusing on technology problems,” she says. “Squarespace has a split in the career ladder that allows me to choose between management or individual contribution. I want to return to an individual contributor role so I can keep solving hard technical problems and ultimately be a Staff Engineer. I’m glad I have this option and the support of a great manager and team.” She’s on her second parental leave now and plans to pursue this avenue when she returns to work.

While Polina’s experience at Squarespace is unique to her, it speaks to the company’s empathetic culture as well as their commitment to building a diverse team — one that includes people of all backgrounds, including women and mothers (even those that have taken a career pause to raise a family). After all, diversity of background and culture allows them to do their jobs better. As Molly explains, “Squarespace is committed to developing diverse and inclusive teams so that we can intimately understand, and create for, the multifaceted cultures and identities of our customers.”

Perhaps the best part? Squarespace is hiring! So if you’re like Polina and want a career that will allow you to put your family first, consider one of the open Squarespace roles on Apres. They are hiring across all teams, especially Engineering, Marketing, Creative and People. And if you have a gap in your resume, don’t worry. “Career gaps have become far more common in recent years — it’s all in how you talk about it,” says Molly. “It’s really no different than preparing to talk about a previous job. Treating it the same way normalizes it, which I think is important.”

Click here to learn more about Squarespace’s career opportunities and to submit an application (use our concierge service to email us if you apply!).

 

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