Our Cultural <Code/>

Find out what drives engineering @ Autolist

Overview

At Autolist, we’re focused on creating a great business by building a great product. Building an exceptional product requires a phenomenal engineering team. Naturally, we believe the best way to create and attract incredible engineering talent is by fostering a strong and open engineering culture.

Here are some concrete examples of our commitment:
  • Each week, our engineers are encouraged to spend 3 hours learning through online courses (of their choice), conferences, meetups, etc.
  • Two of our engineers wanted to be at home while their young children grew up, so we set up a work from home program
  • Despite a number of other responsibilities, our CTO still commits code each week
  • Our business team is encouraged to increase their technical literacy and fluency by attending engineering brownbags and taking SQL/scripting/programming classes
  • We hold hackathons every month. Some past projects: AI to recognize car make and model from user photos, performance enhancements that led to 25% decrease in page load time, smart email address validation and suggestions.
Much like our code, we're constantly iterating on our culture, so expect this page to change over time. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Our Principles

Strong Teams == Strong Code

We believe pair programming, mentorship, code reviews, continuing education, and group learning are best for maximizing our output.

Focused on Impact

We anchor all our efforts to clear objectives and success metrics and believe that moving fast is an important part of impact.

Thoughtful Engineering

From technical architecture to process to UX, we strive to constantly learn and apply best practices through rigorous, data-driven experimentation.

Our Challenges

A.I.

Effective marketplaces need to adapt, so we use data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to continually optimize the Autolist marketplace and experience.

Scale

Our traffic has grown 500%+ year over year and we are continuously adding new products, services, and listing partners. Planning for and keeping up with growing demand underpins everything we do.

Security

Trust is crucial for any marketplace. From ensuring data accuracy and quality to protecting our user data and transactions, our whole platform requires seamless security to earn the trust and business of our users and partners.

Experience

Great experiences are a part of our “special sauce,” which keeps our users and partners happy. We sweat the small stuff on the front-end, but also realize a lot of what makes a great experiences is a thoughtful and robust backend.

Individual Learnings

  • I joined Autolist without any experience in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Took the first week learning about it and get to the speed to work on internationalization our website.

  • Back when we had no Android app, two of us with no prior Android experience spent a month learning Android development fundamentals. We then began building v1 of our app, continuing to learn as we went, which went on to become the #1 rated app in its category.

  • I needed an API to solve a problem on the back end. It seemed like serverless lambdas would be the ideal solution, but I had no experience with them. So I learned a bit from online courses plus colleagues, wrote an AWS Lambda, and deployed it to production in less than a day.

  • I wanted to give a competitive edge to an upcoming product, and the right solution was to develop a Convolutional Neural Network using a deep learning framework. I gave it shot, and had my first version working in 3 days. It still needs work, so I’m continuing to train it.

  • I joined Autolist without any experience in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Took the first week learning about it and get to the speed to work on internationalization our website.

  • Back when we had no Android app, two of us with no prior Android experience spent a month learning Android development fundamentals. We then began building v1 of our app, continuing to learn as we went, which went on to become the #1 rated app in its category.

Learning @ Autolist

Our engineers get 3 hours each week to actively learn. This can mean taking online courses, dabbling with technologies or approaches which they are not familiar, or any activity that improves their engineering or leadership ability.

Technologies We Love

Elasticsearch
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Lambda
Amazon Kinesis
React
Redux
Node
Next.js
Firebase
Kotlin
Swift
Heroku
Python
Ruby on Rails
TensorFlow
Spark

Want to learn more?

Let's chat! Check out our jobs page or get in touch with our CTO.
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