Engineering teams that use cutting-edge technologies

We’re leveraging the latest technology to deliver the most effective learning and coaching platform possible.

At Upduo, we help companies deliver engaging one-on-one coaching sessions at scale that drive measurable business outcomes. While other learning and training platforms tend to use older legacy frameworks, we take advantage of the latest technologies to create a tool that is fun for end users and effective for companies. We use Django on the backend and React, React Native, and TypeScript for our frontend.

By staying on the cutting edge of these frameworks’ releases, we’re able to remain nimble and beat out legacy incumbents. In the near future, we’ll also have additional microservices that use even newer frameworks. That said, if you haven’t worked with a certain tech stack before, it’s not a problem at all. In fact, all of our current engineers used completely different tech stacks before joining us! We look for folks who are eager to learn.

The pandemic only underscored the increasing need for better virtual learning options and there’s clear product-market fit. As we continue to migrate our infrastructure to new technologies and delve into AI (to help recommend curriculums to customers for example), new hires will have lots of exciting problems to work on.

We have a long track record of pioneering industry changing innovation.

Snap is one of the most used cameras in the world with over 300 million daily active users. It was built to help people connect with their real friends in ways that reflect real life. While Snapchat has changed a lot over the years, our camera is evolving from a way to communicate visually in a Snap, into an augmented reality platform. We are an early leader in AR – we bet big on it (in 2015) when others didn’t – and as a result have a huge competitive advantage. Our teams, creators, and developers are building a range of AR experiences that give our community the ability to learn new languages, experience live events like never before, and easily try on a new pair of sneakers. Our continued investments in augmented reality represent our ongoing efforts to build technology that serves humanity and that feels intuitive and familiar to use. Our camera helps our community experience the world in new ways everyday – from Lenses (laying AR onto the world around us), to Spectacles (sunglasses built for the future of computing), to Lens Studio (an application designed for artists and developers) to Maps (watching Snaps by Snapchatters around the world). We’re also at the beginning of spatial technology – we have the potential to map space in detail – not just walls and surfaces, but also things like Big Ben or Notre-Dame.

We maintain a complex, interdependent chain of technology.

We don’t just aim to build a great marketplace for customers and shoppers. We are also trusted by many of the top retailers in North America to power their ecommerce businesses, something that’s so important to this industry as transactions move online. With our marketplace as well as enterprise offerings, we build the technological forefront of our retailers.

We’ve doubled down on machine learning and data science in order to maintain a massive data catalog (the largest grocery catalog ever), mitigate lost demand in our fulfillment chain, and build the technological backend of our retail partners’ white-label sites (if you made an online purchase from Costco.com, it was powered by Instacart). Check out this deep dive on the algorithms we use to power Instacart.

Our backend systems support tight integrations with some of the largest retailers in North America and our engineers are working to scale operations across our iOS, Android, and web applications. We currently use Rails, Ruby, Python, R, PostgreSQL 9.6, React 0.17, AWS, Docker, RabbitMQ, Sidekiq, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Twilio, Mapbox, and SiftScience, but don’t require folks to have experience with our stack. There is no shortage of interesting models to improve, algorithms to optimize, and problems to solve as we reach scale. If you have a solid sense for basic languages and are eager to learn new ones, please reach out!

Be the first to apply brand new techniques and research.

We work with the best researchers, labs, and development teams in the world, and are often the first to apply new breakthroughs to a developer-ready product. We are built on cutting edge distributed technologies: IPFS, IPLD, LibP2P, DIDs, and blockchains. One critical role we play is to take cutting-edge technology and make it useful and usable for other developers.

We’ve built breakthrough innovations on top of this. Ceramic’s stream-processing design is the first to offer scalability through local-first consensus, flexibility through StreamType validation, and cross-network support through DID-based authentication.

We don’t require any particular experience of our engineers. Very few have worked with the tech we have, and it’s our pleasure to help new teammates get up to speed, learn, and become experts in their own right over time.

We’re not just using the best-in-class technologies, we’re actively innovating and building on them.

Our infrastructure is orchestrated using Kubernetes, and is crucial to everything we do. We also use Cadence, Presto, and Flink for core functions of our system. You can listen/read about all of the details on our tech on our Software Engineering Daily podcast interview!

Ultimately, our goal is to create capabilities based on these tools that solve our customers’ problems in unique and specialized ways. Using cutting-edge technologies allows us to do so in a stress-free way; we can have predictable releases and build a lot of trust with our processes when we’re not getting slowed down by tech that’s constantly breaking or doesn’t work.