i joined robinhood as L5 SWE about 14 months ago. i don't post about my employer usually but i see a lot of either 'robinhood is amazing' (usually from people who just joined) or 'robinhood is a startup-cosplaying-as-a-company' (from people who left angry). neither is fully accurate from where i sit.
the honest version:
wlb is team-dependent more than company-dependent. my team (core brokerage infra) has reasonable hours. nobody is grinding 60-hour weeks as a norm. on-call rotation is real: i'm on monthly and it has woken me up at 3am, but incidents are less frequent than my previous fintech job.
on the culture side: robinhood went through a rough patch post-2021 (the meme-stock era + layoffs + regulatory scrutiny). the culture now is more cautious and more execution-focused than 'move fast.' that's probably good for the product and moderately boring for engineers who wanted the startup energy.
things that are genuinely good: the engineering quality has improved. the caliber of new hires is higher than 3 years ago. small team ownership. my squad owns meaningful user-facing surface area with real autonomy. the mission (democratizing finance) actually matters to most people here. it's not performative.
things that are less good: some middle management layers are reactive and slow. decisions that should take a week take three. cross-team coordination is harder than it should be for a company this size. post-layoff there's a 'do more with less' vibe in some orgs that translates to scope creep without headcount.
if you're evaluating robinhood vs a big tech role for wlb: it compares favorably to amazon or google infra teams. it does not compare to the chill roles at stripe or some smaller fintechs. somewhere in the middle.