Looking for a New Engineering Role? These Companies Are Hiring.
With Q4 on the horizon, companies across Los Angeles are gearing up to finish the year on strong footing. So far, they have raised capital, improved content creation abilities, and expanded C-suites. For these seven businesses, part of that ongoing strategy involves building out their engineering teams to keep pace with such growth.
To learn more about each company’s tech stack, upcoming projects and unique culture, we met with seasoned members of their engineering teams. If you’re scoping out new opportunities for fall and beyond, one of their open roles may be for you.
Their tech stack: Cloudbeds uses open source technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Java, Springboot, Python, Spark, Delta Lake, MLFlow, Airflow and Service Mesh. “We contribute actively to K8ssandra, NoSQLBench, Delta Lake and Confluent for Kubernetes,” Parikh said. “It gives me the opportunity to engage with other like-minded technologists and organizations. Our systems are continuously monitored with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog and other stacks. Our Kubernetes workloads are battle-tested and prepared with Chaos Engineering practices in mind; our platform operates with GitOps’ philosophy at its heart, and we support solutions using Terraform, Helm, and continuous quality tooling.”
Modernizing mindset: “We are going through a modernization journey with a platform as a product mindset. We are building an ecosystem, rather than just software. As part of this journey, we are working on some of the multi-year to multi-quarter initiatives that lay the foundation of our next-generation cloud-native open platform. This includes a data platform that will drive all future capabilities and products at Cloudbeds. I strongly appreciate this data-first approach, as we can empower our hoteliers, unlock new revenue streams, and deliver better guest experiences. I love the wide scope of the technologies I touch and understanding the breadth of use cases that this platform will support.”
Remote, but not distant: “Cloudbeds has been fully remote since its founding in 2012. I live outside of Halifax, Canada, and Cloudbeds’ remote work policy allows me to live and work from a place that I love. I can hire the best and brightest team members, regardless of their location. Two things come to mind that make me proud of our culture at Cloudbeds: ‘servant leadership’ and knowledge-sharing. As we are a fully remote organization, we have to trust each other to get work done, and done well, without micromanagement. As an architect and team lead, I know we take learning and career development seriously, and team members appreciate that. Each team has the freedom to define, own and execute quarterly objectives, but we make sure that teams don’t become knowledge silos through practiced asynchronous communication strategies.”
Their tech stack: “At Thrive Market, our front end is built utilizing React for Web, Native Kotlin for Android, and Swift for iOS,” Srinandan said. “On the back end, we use languages that include PHP, Python, Go and Java. Our microservices are written in Java, Python and Go. MySQL and DynamoDB are our databases. We use Kafka for event-driven data and asynchronous processes, and Elasticsearch and Redis for fast lookup of indexed data and caching. We use Cucumber for test automation which runs on Concourse for CI/CD automated pipelines. For reporting, we use Tableau and Snowflake, along with Airflow to orchestrate and schedule automated jobs. All of our infrastructure lives in AWS, and we use EC2 for creating dynamic testing environments. Our services are containerized using Docker.”
BYOB (build your own box): This project allows our customers to categorize their shopping carts into personalized boxes (frozen, wine, grocery, etc.). It is the biggest project we have worked on at Thrive Market relative to revenue and business impact. The sheer number of cross-functional teams involved in launching the project was itself a feat. I lead the development efforts for BYOB, which means I work with product managers to get requirements and develop the technical design that satisfies all the use-cases and stakeholders. Getting involved in all aspects of the business as a developer and lead was very rewarding and exciting.”
Transparency from the top: “The most unique thing about Thrive Market is our level of transparency. I have worked with bigger companies, but I have never seen executives as transparent as they are here. During my first one-on-one, my manager shared his screen and put all of his notes right in front of me. I could see everything! I felt like an actual part of the team rather than someone who takes orders and does work. Our prioritization process is also very clear; if the direction we choose is detailed and effective, we get full support from leadership, which is rare in most tech companies. The pace is demanding; however, leadership ensures we get the time we need to rest.”
Their tech stack: “Our native applications are bespoke, meaning they’re purpose-built for our product,” Anderson said. “We’ve built a native iOS app that wraps a Unity and ARKit world-building experience, which can then stream locally and via the internet. It’s an incredible opportunity to build an app from scratch with Apple’s newest SwiftUI frameworks and be an early adopter.”
Solutions from scratch: “Although streaming video to the internet is nothing new, at Encore we were presented with the challenge of streaming our own AR audio and AR video to other devices in the Encore studios. This was an opportunity (and challenge) to build a custom UDP compression and streaming protocol, as there aren’t any out-of-the-box frameworks for this use case. I love the challenge of building a solution from scratch, creating something that is really outside the bounds of what normal iOS apps can do, and being on the forefront of new technologies.”
Problem-solving with passion: “Everyone at Encore lives and breathes music. Seeing that love translate into problem-solving is really inspiring. From engineers bringing in instruments to test their occlusion in AR to our CTO putting on a live DJ set to test audio quality, it’s really inspiring to see passion put into our product. I also appreciate the culture of collaboration. We’re building an engineering team where everyone has a voice and everyone is valued. We tackle a lot of challenging problems, many of which have no modern examples to point to for guidance. Ownership and pride in our work and product run deep.”
Their tech stack: “Our tech stack is Python and Django on the back end, with React and JavaScript on the front end,” Langford said. “We also use tools such as Tailwind, a CSS framework, and Storybook to develop UI components and pages within our React app. One of our engineers is creating a package to help generate micro front ends in a timely manner. Eventually, we want to migrate most of our front-end code to micro front ends. Within these micro front ends, we’ll have Tailwind, Storybook and other popular tools.”
Teamwork in action: “I’m currently working on a project to help clients sign up and onboard their Emotive account without the help of an onboarding specialist. It’s been fun to go through the process and work with other engineers. I appreciated that I was included from the beginning of the planning and have been able to provide input on certain decisions. Emotive has a very collaborative culture that makes work more fun.”
Knowledge access across the board: “One thing that stands out to me about Emotive is how accessible the more senior engineers are, and how they’re always willing to share their knowledge. For example, one senior engineer hosts office hours where other team members can ask questions about a project they’re working on or just watch him code. We also like to celebrate our wins. When my team had a big release, our PM planned a virtual happy hour where we could play games and let loose a little.”
Their tech stack: “For the SimplePractice web app, we use Ruby on Rails on the back end and Ember.js on the front end,” Doulatshahi said. “One of the reasons I was excited to join the SimplePractice team a few years ago was the opportunity to learn Ember.js, which I hadn’t used before. Since it was my first time using a front-end framework or library, there definitely was a learning curve. I’m definitely an Ember convert now, and I look forward to features where I can touch our Ember code. I’m also a big Rails fan—I love the MVC conventions, and I just love writing Ruby.”
Owning feature production: “Over my two years at SimplePractice, I’ve had the chance to work on features touching all different parts of our application. One feature that comes to mind is giving practices the ability to automatically close their pay periods. I really enjoyed being able to own the feature from beginning to end. This feature also felt like a milestone for me in terms of how much I had learned in Ember. It was the most complex Ember code I had ever written up to that point.”
Mutual support: “This is my first role where I’ve been part of a large engineering team. I’ve been consistently impressed with our team’s focus on quality (both in terms of code and in terms of product), mentorship and growth. Everyone is generous with their time and eager to help others learn. It’s made me a better engineer, and I’m proud to contribute to that culture however I can.”
Their tech stack: “Our founders built Edify in PHP, but since we’ve grown and found our monolith growing too, we’ve converted over to a service-oriented architecture using Node.js coupled with a TypeScript front end built on a React and Redux framework,” McInnis said. “For databases, we use MySQL and Redis, while communications are handled through WebRTC and SocketCluster. For CI/CD we use Docker, Kubernetes and Github actions with a blend of AWS and Google Cloud services for storage, deep-learning and deployment. Seeing live transcriptions feed into translation modules to output real-time translated speech-to-text is just one example of how powerful deep-learning neural networks are shaping the way people interact and communicate.”
Building broadly: “We are constantly building. Our developers are working on a vast array of incredibly robust productivity tools for our customers, so it’s hard to pick any one project. From real-time video conferencing and targeted reporting features to our mobile expansion, we’re building out utilities before our customers even know they need them. One of the most fundamental and powerful features is the ability for anyone to build customized contact center workflows that leverage drag-and-drop routing, translation, transcription, A/B testing, automated services and so much more.”
Creative connections: “Edify puts in the extra effort to make you feel appreciated and valued. Whether its wine and cheese happy hours or murder mystery nights, leadership values and encourages meeting all the amazing people from other parts of the organization.”
Their tech stack: “For the back end, we use microservice architecture consisting of several REST API Web Services implemented in Python, and hosted over AWS,” Jog said. “Our front end is split into two main sections; public and administrative. Every practice has a public website that they show to their patients, which leverages our website designer for balancing flexibility with ease of use and is behind a dedicated CloudFront distribution for each practice. There’s also an administrative UI (called the Portal) that the practice administrator implements with Vue.js using micro-front-end architecture. Additionally, we’re using Xamarin for enabling practices to use our mobile portal. My favorite tool is pretty much all IDEs provided by JetBrains. They’re so easy to work with, no matter what it is!”
An intentional approach: “Our team has been striving to ensure that we’re able to add new communication features with ease, without sacrificing on the reliability and performance. When we started, we were only able to send one-way messages to patients. We’ve dramatically improved by now enabling two-way communication, real-time notifications over mobile and browser, and most importantly, allowing members to simply plug their use-case into our platform! I’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from the different approaches we’ve taken. We’re also not scared to back-track and take a new approach if we think that it will benefit us greatly in the long run.”
Collective values: “Our engineering teams are centered around ‘value streams.’ Every team strives to improve both the product and engineering metrics around a particular domain. This enables both the product and the engineering side to closely work together as a small startup. The team includes product owners, an engineering manager, QA and developers. As a result, almost everyone has an equal chance of influencing each other, which ultimately benefits the customer as we get to explore an idea from multiple angles.”
