As an engineer on the job hunt, what piques your interest about a company? Is it a tech stack complete with the latest and greatest tools? How about a company culture that emphasizes collaboration and authenticity? Or perhaps, it’s the opportunity to build an enterprise scale application.
Whichever it may be, you’re in the right place. We rounded up nine Austin-based tech companies that boast all of the above and more. The icing on the cake? They’re all actively looking for talented developers to join their ranks.
From Atmosphere to Care.com, Karro Technologies, Liquibase and more, these companies have a lot to offer when it comes to their technologies, cultures and projects.
“Our engineering teams are made up of a diverse group of people with different backgrounds, in different locations, each of whom brings a unique perspective to the problems we’re solving,” Realtor’s VP of Engineering, Enablement Services and Data Platform Suzy Julius said.
Cloudflare is an information technology company that protects existing online applications without altering their structure or adding any hardware. The company routes traffic through its global network, becoming smarter with each site added.
Cloudflare’s tech stack: “We just launched Cloudflare Pages in April, so it’s kind of all I can talk about,” Rogers said. “Pages’ control plane uses Postgres with Go, running in Kubernetes. For our builds, we use Rust, Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV. I think I’ve had a pretty unique experience as far as tech stacks go. I spent my first two years or so at Cloudflare developing on Workers, then moved to Pages which is built on Workers!”
Working together as a team: “Pages has been challenging in that it’s complex by necessity — it needs to do a lot of things to get from a Git push to a website. The design work to get us from zero to MVP was so fun. We kept an open video chat called the ‘party line’ and had lots of lively discussions on strategy and edges. It really helped us gel and work together as a team on something so fresh. I’ve since moved on to lead the team, so I consider myself our ‘democratically-elected representative.’”
Getting out of your comfort zone: “The way Cloudflare does beta is really unique. We started getting beta customers on Pages much earlier than I was personally used to or comfortable with, so I thought it was going to be a complete disaster. Instead, we got a steady stream of amazing feedback with folks giving us feature ideas, calling out bugs and validating that we were on the right track. I’ve never released a product like this and I’m never looking back. It was great.”
Backed by $255 million in VC funding, Honor is a home care company that aims to bring scalable workforce management and technology expertise together to deliver high-touch, personalized care for families, caregivers and local agency owners.
Honor’s tech stack: “We pick tools and languages that let us build and ship fast,” Kshetramade said. “Our backend is built in Python, with data in MySQL, all running on AWS. React with TypeScript drives our web apps, and our native mobile apps are written in Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android). Apache Thrift glues it all together, allowing us to easily make API calls and work with data across multiple platforms and languages.”
Challenging, yet rewarding work: “We’re currently building a new dashboard to help our care operations team stay on top of the important tasks — visits that need staffing, urgent tickets and more. The dashboard is challenging in two ways. We need to present a rich array of information, so we’re always collaborating with our designers to find the best user experience. On the technical side, we have to figure out how to efficiently and scalably query lots of different data sources. We also have a tight feedback loop with our care operations colleagues, which allows for continuous improvement of the dashboard. This project is extremely rewarding since we get to see firsthand how we’re helping provide better care to our clients through technology and data.”
A focus on the customer’s perspective: “We are a group of empathetic product engineers who are always willing to collaborate and support one another. As product engineers, we solve challenging problems with a constant focus on the customer's perspective. We don’t simply use the latest and greatest tools. Instead, we are deliberate with our engineering decisions and determine which tools are the best for our purposes. Additionally, we have a unique environment where many of our customers are also our own employees, which creates a tight feedback loop that enables us to iterate faster.”
Atmosphere is a streaming portal designed for businesses that contains original, owned and operated ambient TV channels curated to fit any vibe and environment.
Atmosphere’s tech stack: “We use a variety of tools and languages on a daily basis,” DiTullio said. “Some of which include Google Cloud Platform, Puppet, Datadog, Python, Node.js, Vue.js, Swift, Domo and more. My favorite is probably Datadog because it gives you a good sense of scale. I love spending my free time analyzing data or debugging a spike in Sherlock.”
Bringing new users to the platform: “We’re designing and building a super cool new secret thing! It will unify a lot of our products, but at the same time there will be a lot of new greenfield development. It will hopefully bring in a ton of new users and engagement to the platform. It will include a lot of challenges across the board from product to UI/UX, data architecture, front and backend API, real time analytics processing and more.”
Camaraderie through and through: “The team is full of smart, dedicated and passionate engineers. But, what really makes our team unique is that we’re goofy and know how to have fun with each other. It’s obvious how much the team enjoys working together and I’m lucky to be a part of it.”
FloSports is a streaming and original content media company dedicated to delivering high-quality underserved sports content and programming via digital platforms worldwide. Sports the company streams include include cycling, motorsports, wrestling, rugby, gymnastics and more.
FloSports’ tech stack: “We recently decided to make a push to modernize our tech stack by embracing Kubernetes,” Patel said. “We containerized and migrated existing VM-based workloads to run as containers within Google Kubernetes Engine. So now, we run almost all of our new and existing workloads within Kubernetes. We also leverage Istio Service Mesh for uniform telemetry and traffic routing. Our stack consists of numerous code repositories, written in several languages, which power our web, live, TV and mobile experiences.”
Simulating realistic traffic patterns: “We realized that in order for us to build reliable applications, we would need to load test them as frequently as possible. Our initial approach, using a third-party vendor to perform canned load tests, was expensive and not representative of the kinds of traffic patterns we encountered in the real world. To solve this, we mobilized our own load testing platform using Kubernetes, k6 and GoReplay.
“In order to simulate realistic traffic patterns, we decided to capture a copy of all of the incoming requests flowing through our Istio Service Mesh and save them to a BigQuery dataset. We then developed the ability to play a slice of those requests back at the correct speed, replicating real traffic patterns for all our web services. It can also amplify request volume and simulate a really busy weekend anytime we like.”
Flexibility to build: “Our teams are given a lot of time and flexibility to build the systems they dream about building. Engineering is an art form and a balancing act, which is why we are always evaluating and prioritizing the next generation of our systems. We like to collaborate before any development is done to ensure that our application architecture follows known best practices. We meet weekly and have guilds for specific areas of engineering like APIs, frontend, infrastructure and more, to discuss the latest emerging patterns and practices in those areas. But, most importantly, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. If it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing!”
Care.com is an online marketplace for childcare, senior care, special needs care, tutoring, pet care and housekeeping.
Care.com’s tech stack: “Currently, we are in the midst of a company-wide transformation from disparate monoliths to cloud native applications built on a common, inner-sourced platform,” Hammond said. “We have adopted a modern toolkit of Node.js, React, Next.js, GraphQL and TypeScript for building engaging user experiences. On the backend, we use Go microservices that use gRPC and Apache Kafka to talk to each other. It’s then deployed to AWS with Kubernetes or serverless offerings like AWS Lambda or AWS Step Functions.
“I am absolutely stoked to be part of a team that’s incorporating these ancillary tools throughout our platform. Whether we are decommissioning legacy systems or delivering new features, instrumentation and infrastructure empower developers at Care.com to move quickly and ship with confidence.”
Building software faster: “Since joining Care.com in November 2020, I have been evangelizing LaunchDarkly for feature flagging and experimentation across multiple teams. I am a staunch advocate of using feature toggles by any means possible, whether it’s through a third party like LaunchDarkly, or simpler approaches, like environment variables and configuration files. I have witnessed first hand how separating deployments from feature rollouts can be a catalyst for building software faster with less risk, and I enjoy working on projects with that level of impact on a business.”
Friday morning DnA: “One thing that really stands out about the culture at Care.com is our weekly design and architecture meeting (aka DnA). Every Friday morning, the floor is open for anyone to share something they are working on with the entire engineering organization. These meetings are a wonderful opportunity to work on public speaking skills and collaborate with people you may not see on a regular basis.”
Bright Health is a software company that integrates financing, care delivery and technology to create a better healthcare experience for its customers.
Bright Health’s tech stack: “On the mobile team, we are using Flutter to build Android and iOS apps,” Gonzalez said. “We also develop and maintain our own ‘backend for frontend’ using .NET Core. This allows us to be flexible when our external dependencies change to keep the apps up and running since Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store can sometimes take a while to fully roll out. Additionally, as developers, this also gives us a sense of ownership on the entire stack of our application. Each developer can take a user story from start to finish, backend to front. We also use the latest Azure technologies, which is something I really enjoy because it reduces our overhead as a development team.”
Projects that exemplify Bright Health’s mission: “Right now, I’m working on a project that will make healthcare access easier and more readily available to all. I’m really excited about its potential and I love that it truly exemplifies our mission of making healthcare right. I think it will have a huge impact and it’s exactly why I joined Bright. A really fun aspect of this project has also been learning Flutter. All of us come from various backgrounds in native mobile or .NET experience, so we’re all learning together and we’ve been pleasantly surprised by it each step of the way. The velocity it allows us to achieve as a dev team has been awesome to see.”
Working quickly and efficiently: “Being a full-stack team allows us to move really quickly and efficiently. I’ve seen it time and time again in other engineering orgs. For example, an iOS team, an Android team and a back-end team are all working on the same project, but inevitably one of the teams is running a bit behind which then leads to frustration and finger-pointing. This is a non-issue here at Bright and it’s something I've really appreciated!”
Information technology company Liquibase creates database automation software for the systems management market in order to speed up database releases for software development teams. Its platform can also simulate future changes before they’re deployed to review the impact they’ll have on the application.
Liquibase’s tech stack: “My day to day is largely spent on the frontend using technologies like nrwl NX, Angular, Angular Material, NgRx (Redux for Angular) and more,” Buckner said. “There are a lot of other ancillary tools that I use when writing software, but those prop up the bulk of our web-based software offerings. I’ve found myself more and more excited about the skills that will translate from using these specific tools. For example, the techniques and patterns that can be applied across a wide swath of technologies such as programming paradigms, software design patterns, standardized protocols and more.”
Building an enterprise scale app: “Not too long ago, we started work on a new SaaS product to provide Liquibase users a centralized experience for real-time collaboration. This experience is something we as an organization felt was missing from our product suite, so we set out to create Liquibase Hub. I’d say what I enjoy most about working on Hub is the challenge of building an enterprise scale application with a single front-end engineer. It was exhilarating to take on a challenge of that size — I had never built a web application of that scale before. It was awesome to prove to myself that I could take on a challenge of this size while still delivering high-quality software.”
An environment of meritocracy: “A big part of our culture is fostering an environment of meritocracy. The best idea wins, period. It doesn't matter who provided the idea or what idea your idea builds upon — none of that really influences our decisions. The only thing that matters to us is that the new idea is objectively better, and we (or at least a majority of us) agree with that fact. That speaks to the quality of employees we hire. Our organization will take as long as necessary to find the right fit for a given position. Because we’ve held ourselves to that standard, we now have an organization filled with top quality minds — from top to bottom.”
Realtor.com covers all stages of the home buying and selling process. The company aims to help people realize their dream of homeownership by using technology to simplify the journey, provide clarity and smooth out the bumps along the way.
Realtor.com’s tech stack: “One of the things that impressed me the most when I started working at Realtor.com is how modern our tech stack is,” Julius said. “We’re fully on AWS cloud utilizing managed services and datastores. We use ReactJS, Python, and TypeScript. We also utilize tools and processes (New Relic and CI/CD) at every layer of our tech stack to monitor and continuously improve system health. I’m excited to have the power of the AWS system at our fingertips to build what our customers need. Our business strategy and overall technical vision provide us with a lot of challenging problems to solve, and this tech stack will help us deliver faster and more reliably.”
Data-driven decisions: “A project I’m excited about is our data strategy and data platform. This is such a crucial component of our tech stack as it will enable the rest of the business to make data-driven decisions. Our multifaceted solution will unlock opportunities across our business including marketing, analytics, data science, product and engineering, and will focus on every aspect of the data value chain. With petabytes of diverse data at our fingertips, we can provide clear value to our users and ultimately help everyone find the perfect home.”
A culture of collaboration and authenticity: “Something really unique about Realtor.com is how our diversity has evolved organically, particularly in the engineering org. Over the years, Realtor.com has acquired a number of companies. Each acquisition has resulted in advances to our diversity. Today, our engineering teams are made up of people with different backgrounds, in different locations, each of whom brings a unique perspective to the problems we’re solving. Our investment in diversity and inclusion will continue as we grow, and I’m confident we will thrive with a culture of collaboration and authenticity — all while having fun.”
Karros Technology is a transportation company that focuses on getting students to school safely and on time through route optimization, GPS tracking and predictive machine learning.
Karro Technologies’ tech stack: “Data streams have become a central part of our distributed microservices architecture, and this has given us an opportunity to take advantage of Apache Kafka and its related messaging and streaming technology,” Nguyen said. “Through Kafka, we use Kafka Streams and KTable, which has helped us understand how data and information can be passed not only between two components but between hundreds of components. It has been exciting to see how these new tools and patterns have enabled us to go far beyond our previous performance and scalability limitations.”
Exciting streaming technologies: “A project we’re currently working on is live and immediate distribution of routing information. Planned routes are a central and critical component of all school bus transportation operations. Generally, routes are developed by a team of specialists in the school’s transportation department. These routes must then be distributed to others such as drivers, dispatchers, secretaries, parents, students and more. So, our task is to distribute updates of this routing information immediately to everyone else in the school district. The challenge is both domain specific and technical. It also gives us the opportunity to use new and exciting streaming technologies and frameworks.”
Fair access to education: “Working in school bus technology and software is a unique experience. We develop software for school districts, so it would seem that our work is very technical. That’s certainly true, but it’s not the complete story. School bus transportation, in the end, is a very human problem — it’s about making sure that all children have fair access to their education. It’s a pleasure to work with others who go beyond just the technical problem. The team here is committed to helping these students get to school, and technology and engineering is how they do it. To see the team bringing decades of experience from other, more ‘advanced’ industries to bear in education is so exciting.”
