What does an Austin real estate brokerage platform, an app that turns any smartphone into a walkie-talkie and a virtual reality company have in common? They’re all growing, and looking to beef up their engineering teams along the way.
To give you a head start on where to apply, Built In Austin spoke with seven engineers to learn more about the tech stacks they work with, the most interesting or challenging projects they’ve tackled, and what separates their job from the other engineering roles they’ve held in the past.
What they do: Worksmith is a software-enabled marketplace that connects commercial tenants and property owners/managers with qualified local service providers for repairs, maintenance and cleaning.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack.
My favorite tools tend to be ones that automate the manual steps in our process, and two that come to mind are Cypress and Jenkins. Our Cypress tests cover almost all of our regression, while our Jenkins pipelines handle our GitOps and DevOps. Honorable mentions for internal tools are a queue/microservice system for distributing workloads, our home-grown internal reporting system and a handful of third-party integrations that make life easier on us and better for our users.
We’re a smaller team with large features to build, so we don't have anyone working on these tools full-time, but we reserve 10-15 percent of our roadmap for building out tools and other tech initiatives. As for our tech stack, at a high level we build our back-end services in Spring Boot, our client side applications in React/React Native and use AWS for hosting, but we are always exploring new technologies as we continue to expand our product.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now?
One project we’re working on will bring a new, unique type of user to our digital marketplace. These users will be interacting with our software primarily through text, email and forms in a lightweight web app. They won’t have a username and password, rather, their phone number and email will establish identity and a means of authentication. I love this project because it challenges us to bring the barrier of entry for interacting with our software as low as possible while still following SOC 2 security guidelines. It will also test our ability to write client-side code that will run on any device/browser combination. This project gives us the opportunity to put software in the hands of users who aren't currently using any. What’s more exciting than that?
As it pertains to work culture, we try to maintain our autonomy as developers while upholding the best practices the team has agreed on.’’
What’s something unique about your team?
When was the last time you presented a show-and-tell? Or sang karaoke? Or went to Austin City Limits? These are a few of the traditions we’ve established throughout the years as an Austin-based company. We also like to try new things, and look forward to the influence that new teammates will have.
We keep some time on the calendar each week for discussions around new or existing best practices, and the best ideas win. I’d say the thing that is most unique about our team compared to other engineering orgs I’ve been a part of is how closely we work with the product design team. Devs are typically involved at the lo-fi design stage, validating the data structure that the feature will require and providing early feedback on anything that raises concern for scope creep.
What they do: Sysco LABS is a technology-focused division within Sysco, dedicated to reimagining foodservice through innovation.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack.
Our e-commerce site was built using Java microservices, Node.js and React. It is high traffic and mission critical so when we have a problem to solve, we have the opportunity to explore a lot of the latest technologies and pick what solves our use case. The team I work on is currently building a new data platform to handle event streaming using Kafka.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you're working on right now?
The technology we are building will allow our domestic and international partners to sell their products on our site. We already have tens of thousands of customers on our site at a time so building something that can scale globally to help reach more customers as well as provide our existing customers with more products is exciting.
We get to help transform a huge organization that has been around since the ‘60s and make it operate like a modern cutting-edge company.’’
What’s something unique about your team?
It has this startup feel because we are building new tools for our customers, but we are supported by Sysco. Our team at LABS is small but we are working on big problems. In my few years here, I have been exposed to a variety of technologies and seen transformations in how we do business unlike anywhere else in my career.
What they do: REX’s digital platform and full-service real estate brokerage uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify buyers and sell homes outside of the MLS, saving customers thousands of dollars in real estate transactions.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack.
We are fairly agnostic about tech stacks and tools at REX. In our minds, we use whatever tools function best at solving the problem at hand. Personally, my go-to tech tools for developing are Tmux and Vim. When it comes to preferred programming frameworks at REX, we use a variety: React, Next.js, Flask, React Native and more.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now?
At REX, we’re constantly working on new, interesting and challenging projects. As an industry pioneer, the engineering team is trying to innovate and disrupt the real estate environment.
Some of REX’s core values within engineering and the company as a whole are trust, excellence and care.’’
What’s something unique about your team?
REX truly prioritizes its team culture and core values. Prior to joining REX, I found that other engineering orgs did not put as much value on cultural fit as REX does. This is important to me.
If I had to pick the single differentiating factor REX has over other teams I’ve been a part of, it would be the latitude to learn new skills and solve interesting problems within the company.
What they do: Immersed is a VR work productivity app. It provides its users experiences like working solo in a spaceship or with others in a co-working space such as an international coffee shop.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack.
We have a strong Unity team that is always pushing our product in order to make working in VR more efficient and enjoyable. Someone joining that team would be able to have a direct impact on the direction of our product, and would be working with peers that have a ton of experience.
I am also proud that our teams have considered Linux along with Mac and Windows from the very beginning. They do a lot of C++ coding to make this happen. Thanks to our early success, we are already evolving our infrastructure toward scalability and security.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now?
Due to the success of our product, we have already started refactoring parts of our infrastructure to accommodate bigger load demands. We are evolving our infrastructure, expanding our teams, growing our user base and re-shaping our product. The company is in that sweet spot for any engineer to join since our work is having a direct impact in the performance and direction of the product.
Any engineer interested in performance, event-driven architectures and big data would have a ton of fun at this stage of the company.’’
What’s something unique about your team?
This workforce has the passion, the skills and the courage to make the vision of working in VR a reality. Here, a new hire would find an agile startup that’s evolving and iterating fast. The important thing to notice is the stage we’re at as a startup. This is not a startup still figuring out what its mission is or whether or not potential clients want this product. This is a startup that already has the early version of working in VR and being used by thousands of early adopters, and the sector is reaching the point where working in VR is becoming mainstream.
What they do: Self helps underserved and credit invisible people build and establish their credit through the company’s credit builder account.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack.
The data team uses AWS to build an ecosystem of pulling data from all data sources, internal and external to Self, to create the analytics data model for all internal stakeholders, ensure security and data governance, and monitor data integrity. We use Airflow to schedule and monitor our data pipelines automatically.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now?
We are introducing validation checks on raw data and modeled data to maintain the health of our data models and trust in them. I enjoyed collaborating with other teams and fitting all the pieces together from different systems while working on this project. The work we do directly affects every team internally for analysis, decision-making, alerting, tracking and reporting purposes.
Personally speaking, I learn something new every day.’’
What’s something unique about your team?
Our team is small, diverse, proactive and always open to new ideas. We have good educational programs and access to LinkedIn Learning for everyone. Our team supports and appreciates the work put in to complete the tasks.
What they do: Zello helps frontline workers meet rapidly evolving, urgent real-world challenges with instant, scalable push-to-talk solutions.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack.
I’m focused on front end and desktop, and I mostly enjoy working with React and Redux. We also use TypeScript, Sass, Electron and Jest. Our team frequently performs user tests for early and often feedback on design and implementation. Also, we have recently started implementing automation tests using Jest and Puppeteer.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now?
Our application provides a push-to-talk platform serving front line workers, with its main form of communication utilizing voice messaging. However, recently our team released a few new features expanding communication past voice to texts and image-sharing after customers expressed interest in these features for troubleshooting and day-to-day use. I’ve most enjoyed working on projects like these that provide immediate impact to users.
Our application was particularly useful for businesses during the pandemic for facilitating efficient communication for frontline workers.’’
What’s something unique about your team?
One item I find unique about Zello is how efficiently our team collects and acts on customer feedback and improvements that quickly turn into features for development. I think this is indicative of our customers’ engagement with Zello for their business needs and internally, Zello’s close relationship with its customers. More specific to my team, we’re constantly working on new features that dictate how we as engineers collaborate. Depending on the project, there are certain features designated to one engineer to implement, from start to finish. I find working independently on a project to be a unique and exciting challenge.
What they do: Hippo is modernizing the $100-billion home insurance industry. Its purpose is to help people protect their homes by leveraging technology and data.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack.
At Hippo, we run a distributed system on top of a multi-cloud implementation. Our microservices are written with Node.js mostly, backed by an internally developed framework based on NestJS.
Our developers enjoy using a diverse platform that can support HTTP services, async workers, monitoring, logging and other instrumentations to support the highest developer productivity possible.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now?
Right now, we are working on enabling data science pipelines for continuous learning and augmenting experts with analytics.
Being able to support the unique needs of our customers by enabling data science, analytics and continuous learning in the insurance lifecycle is the ultimate goal. Reducing stress and improving our customer service is a huge engineering challenge that makes coming to work interesting and exciting every day.
We focus engineering efforts around our customer’s needs.’’
What’s something unique about your team?
Our customer focus. We focus engineering efforts around our customer’s needs. How can we improve customer service? How can we reduce wait times? How can we improve the quoting experience? This way, we are able to solve engineering problems that focus on real-world, real-people issues. Seeing the positive impact of happy customers is incredibly satisfying.
