In order to attract and retain new engineers, companies need to offer more than an interesting title and competitive salary. For Colorado tech companies looking to grow their engineering teams, that means opportunities to work on challenging projects with innovative technology.
At aviation company Boom Supersonic, David Hunter, director of software engineering, said his team is working on a flight simulator that allows pilots and engineers to evaluate the nuances of the flight control system in the “approach” and “cruise” phases of flight. This project will enable mission rehearsals to train pilots and the control room, so that pilots will be ready for the first flight.
Hunter’s team’s ultimate mission? Building an airplane that can travel from New York to London in under four hours.
In addition to interesting projects, engineers also crave collaborative cultures. At big data and software company Alteryx, Manager Denise Frey said company culture does not suffer as a result of having remote offices around the world, thanks to an intentional focus on professional development and teamwork.
“Alteryx fosters a growth mindset and I strongly believe this is how we are able to continually improve our processes and be truly innovative,” Frey said.
What they do: Gloo provides predictive analytics technology that empowers organizations to better serve their employees through personal growth. Its data solutions platform enables customers to more effectively engage with people and manage individual personal growth journeys toward physical, mental and spiritual wellness.
Gloo’s tech stack: “Gloo is a native cloud development organization building application services, components and applications on top of AWS,” COO Bill Hippenmeyer said. “Our goal is make our platform available across all the major cloud providers to include Amazon, Google GCP and MSFT Azure.
From top to bottom, our stack is composed on React for the Web UI, variations of Node.js to include TypeScript for our microservices architecture and the usual variety of persistence components to include Postgres, SQL Server, GraphQL, ElasticSearch and MongoDB. From an AWS management and SRE perspective, we leverage all the standard AWS tooling with an infrastructure as code (IaC) bias with additional tooling from VMWare like SecureState and Wavefront.”
Most interesting project: Growth catalyst matching.“How can we leverage the signals from millions of our customers as they interact with growth catalysts to create a better matching engine? We are exploring the use of tensor flow and other machine learning systems training these neural nets on the signals data to offer the better match. It’s a project that’s at the heart of big data analytics and the application of machine learning.”
Something unique about his engineering team: “We have great facilities with fun and smart people. Similar to cloud native culture, our engineers are working every day with state-of-the-art, native cloud technologies to achieve our objectives. It’s fun to be on the cutting edge working with a very talented team of product managers, TPMs and engineers.”
What they do: Boom Supersonic is building Mach 2.2 passenger airlines. With the company’s new plane, they expect aircraft to be able to fly from New York to London in under four hours. Their first prototype is expected by summer 2020.
Boom Supersonic’s tech stack: “For avionics, the team’s job is to deliver the aircraft data acquisition and instrumentation, telemetry, glass cockpit display software and digital controllers such as stability augmentation, environmental control, fuel system monitoring and control,” Lead Principal of Avionics Engineering Jeff Bozarth said. “With that goal in mind, we have a mixture of bare-metal firmware and higher-level applications running on real-time Unix-like operating systems. We make heavy use of C++, MATLAB, Simulink and we leverage Python and Bash scripting for the usual reasons.”
Most interesting project: “Our newly redesigned flight simulator,” David Hunter, director of software engineering, said. “The new simulator allows our pilots and engineers to evaluate the nuances of the flight control system in the approach and cruise phases of flight and enables design decisions that couldn’t have been made without the higher level of mechanical fidelity. It also enables mission rehearsals to train the pilots and the control room, so that everyone is ready for the first flight.”
What makes the team unique: “Boom offers a unique level of product ownership and responsibility for an engineer,” Bozarth said. “An engineer at Boom is responsible for their product from start to finish. This means that an engineer is expected to design their product, integrate it onto the vehicle, and see it through flight tests, which could mean developing test cards and being in the control room during the test flights.”
What they do: Alteryx’s platform provides the analytic flexibility that business analysts, data scientists and IT need to discover, prep, analyze and operationalize analytic models through a collaborative and governed platform.
Alteryx’s tech stack: “My teams work mainly in C++, C#, Python, and JS,” Denise Frey, manager of software engineering, said. “For testing, we are using a mix of Jest, Python and our own Alteryx designer. One of the team’s favorite tools is Visual Studio because it has a lot of nice quality of life features to help with their day-to-day work. Another tool we use throughout our organization is Slack. We love this tool because it allows immediate and efficient communication across the team, rather than having to write up an email and wait for someone to read and respond.”
Most interesting challenge: “My organization has teams spread across the globe with primary locations in Kyiv, Ukraine and Broomfield, Colorado,” Frey said. “Being this geographically diverse creates many challenges, like time zones and cultural differences, which are critical to solving problems. The teams must work collaboratively.
We have initiated multiple activities that help us overcome these challenges. One such activity provides each person on the Kyiv team with a “buddy” here in Colorado that they meet with regularly via Microsoft Teams to talk about life. This allows the teams to maintain their relationships and continue to build trust.”
What makes the team unique: “I have never worked for an organization that is so focused on both associate and customer happiness. As a former customer, I could feel this culture difference from outside of the company. Alteryx fosters a growth mindset and I strongly believe this is how we are able to continually improve our processes and be truly innovative.”
What they do: Gusto’s online people platform lets small businesses take care of their teams, offering payroll, health insurance, human resources and team management tools. The company serves more than 100,000 businesses nationwide.
Gusto’s tech stack: “Ruby on Rails is at the core of the stack and has been since the company opened in 2012,” Tyler Untisz, software engineer, said. “We use Sidekiq for heavy workloads and background processing. Recently, the payments and filings team at Gusto has introduced gradual typing to Ruby via Sorbet. As for the front end, most of what we do is in React with a growing adoption of TypeScript. We use React features like hooks, as well as more recent frameworks like Apollo to consume our GraphQL APIs.”
Most interesting project: “We’re focused on expediting payroll processing to cut down on the time it takes between running payroll and those funds showing up in an employee’s account. Building a great customer experience for the small businesses that use our platform, while ensuring the secure and reliable transfer of funds, has been an interesting challenge to tackle.”
What makes the team unique: “One thing that has helped me forge relationships with folks on the team was a practice we call ‘board and marker.’ When a new member of the team first joins Gusto, we send them up to a whiteboard with a marker to tell their unique story to the group. The vulnerability and authenticity of the team here is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
What they do: Let’s Roam’s mission is to help people explore and connect with others. Hosting scavenger hunts, a dining membership program and daily challenges via their app allows users to create memorable experiences and meet new people. The company’s new proprietary technology, “Fox Vision,” categorizes user-generated images and validates the content through machine learning.
Let’s Roam’s tech stack: “In order to accomplish our company-wide goals, our full-stack developers work on both our website and our app,” Co-founder Michael Harding said. “We use JavaScript frameworks for app development and PHP on the back end for web development. We use iterative development on all tech and engineering projects.”
Most interesting project: “We recently introduced artificial intelligence into our app in order to enhance the game element of the tour for every player. This proprietary technology is called ‘Fox Vision.’ It categorizes user-generated images and validates the content through machine learning. This provides immediate feedback to players and adds bonus points for creativity using internal scoring methods which ups the gamification and enhances the overall scavenger hunt experience.”
What makes the team unique: “We have a huge amount of trust in our engineers and dev team. We have the ability to build and iterate in all aspects of the tech and to follow our impulses in order to move the company forward.”
What they do: DHI Group, Inc. helps individuals with specialized skill sets find the perfect role for their talents. The company uses data insights to help professionals get recruited for roles in technology, security clearance and financial services.
DHI Group’s tech stack: “We are heavily invested in AWS and utilizing the full breadth and depth of the AWS offerings to move to a serverless, cloud-first architecture,” Dan Wyks, senior manager of development, said. “Our engineers work in a variety of established and modern languages including Java, C#, Python and TypeScript and frameworks including Angular 6/7 and Node.js. We’re also very excited about GraphQL.”
Most interesting project: “We are bringing machine learning to bear in our search and match products. We believe machine learning will be transformational in terms of how we match the best candidates with our clients’ needs and will differentiate our search products by driving speed to match.”
What makes the team unique: “We are dramatically re-shaping our technology organization to organize our engineering teams around our domain driven design. Each domain team is cross-functional and fully owns their solutions including architecture, technology choices, infrastructure, quality, DevOps and code.”
What they do: Recurly helps subscription business models manage their billing internally. Its platform provides critical infrastructure, tools and business analytics to manage and scale revenue and billing while optimizing transaction processing.
Recurly’s tech stack: “My favorite tools that we use are Zephyr for maintaining and updating test cases, Ruby and RSpec to automate our test cases, GitHub for collaboration and version control and Jenkins to support continuous integration,” Shilpa Garja, senior quality assurance engineer, said. “We also use MySQL for accessing data, CodeFresh for build and release, Graylog for log monitoring and Bugsnag to monitor bugs.”
Most interesting project: “We are wrapping up a couple of projects that involve complete refactoring of the APIs to improve performance and scalability.”
What makes the team unique: “Each person on the team brings a unique set of skills. We work together and fill in the gaps for end-to-end functional testing, automation, performance testing, security testing and so on. The team contributes to the overall whole of the project by communicating problems quickly and working together to find solutions.”
What they do: Uplight is a technology platform dedicated to serving the energy ecosystem. The team provides customers with targeted recommendations for budgeting while helping preserve the environment. More than 80 utility partners, including National Grid and Exelon, use its energy personalization system.
Uplight’s tech stack: “Our team loves Apache Spark for its scalability and efficient performance; Apache Airflow for its automation and visualization of our data pipelining processes; and CircleCI as it flexibly and reliably provides a simple path to getting a new service stood up with linting, testing and auto deployment,” Sadie Fulton, engineering manager, said. “We also love Redash as it simplifies our investigation, dashboarding, graphing and alerting; React for allowing us to declaratively build UIs based on the state of our applications; Jest for allowing us to confidently write isolated unit tests for our React applications; and PyCharm which provides us a large number of tremendously useful features like remote debugging.”
Most interesting project: “Uplight is the result of a merger between many companies who shared similar missions: move the needle toward energy efficiency, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and savings on customer energy bills. We’ve gone through some huge transformations in the last year, and we’re building our go-forward products and platform. This is hugely exciting because not only do we get to learn and grow from a singular company’s perspective on what constitutes a best-in-breed set of solutions, but also from a diverse set of perspectives and lessons learned.”
What makes the team unique: “Work is a literal joy because of my colleagues and how much fun we have together. I would say that the differentiator between this team and other teams I’ve had experience with boils down to commitment: to our work, to the mission, to each other and to our customers.”
What they do: Zayo provides bandwidth and connectivity services, enabling big businesses to scale their networks and adapt to rapidly changing demand. Their 130,000-mile network in North America and Europe includes extensive metro connectivity to thousands of buildings and data centers.
Zayo’s tech stack: “A large chunk of our development is done on the Salesforce platform,” Alex Ackerman, director of application development, said. “Most of this development is done in the Apex language, which is Salesforce’s proprietary version of Java. Apex is an object-oriented programming language that looks and feels just like Java, but that enables the developer to do things specific to the Salesforce platform in an easier way.
Additionally, we leverage the Lightning Web Component framework, which is a front-end JavaScript framework for the Salesforce platform. This framework is very similar to other modern JS frameworks such as Angular or React. We have a few projects built on Angular, as well as in React. Currently, we are building one of Zayo’s first use cases of machine learning in which we are running a Python application that is attempting to effectively sort all of the invoices that Zayo receives into its accounts payable Gmail box.”
Most interesting project: “I think the most interesting and challenging project we’re working on right now is the one with machine learning. It’s awesome to be on the forefront of a new tool set for Zayo that we can hopefully learn from and apply to other areas of the business. We’re getting a ton of creative freedom with this, as well as the entire application we’re building out for the accounts payable team. The time and money savings should be pretty significant for Zayo as we continue to iterate.”
What makes the team unique: “Everyone is constantly proposing new and exciting ways to do things better. No one is happy with the status quo on any development they are working through, but rather goes above and beyond to push toward optimal solutions that will be sustainable down the road.”
