Welcome to the AMBOSS Engineering Blog

The best company you’ve never heard of

If you’re an engineer you might not have heard of AMBOSS. I hadn’t either before joining in 2018. It’s not a household name or, unlike Spotify, Netflix, Intercom or Zalando, one especially associated with tech— that is, unless you are a medical student or doctor.

With over 95% of the market share in Germany, effectively every doctor in the country who has graduated in the last few years has used AMBOSS for exam preparation.

The English language version has enjoyed strong adoption since its release two years ago — so much so that we’re proud to be well on the way to the number one spot in the US and the rest of the world. Over 500k medical students have studied with us to become doctors, and over 100k doctors are actively using features like our Knowledge Library to provide better healthcare to millions of patients worldwide.

This success, as well as a vision to empower all doctors to provide the best possible care, makes AMBOSS one of the few medical startups contributing to a measurable difference.

To take this living, breathing, growing success and allow it to evolve to meet the requirements of such a massive conception means continuously doubling-down on innovation and quality. It offers us the greatest of tests. It requires not only teams of dedicated physicians to provide excellent content, but also top-tier engineers that work together to solve the challenges involved in delivering such a powerful product.

Another Engineering Blog?

The purpose of our engineering blog is to share who we are and how we do what we do because we feel proud of what we are making. We want to give you an inside view of our product teams and share our technical knowledge, challenges and experiences.

The most definitive thing everyone at AMBOSS has in common, whether at our headquarters in Berlin, or our regional offices in New York and Cologne, is two-fold;

• We share the belief that our product is as solid as they come and is only getting better at delivering on our mission to make a tangible difference to people’s lives every day.
• We pride ourselves on our culture, work-life balance, diversity and the ability to foster opportunities.

Keep reading this blog and learn, for example, about the journey of one of our doctors who went from stethoscope, to Haskell, to JavaScript, to becoming an engineer on our core didactics team.

Despite inhabiting a domain not known for early adoption but rather for its caution, AMBOSS has been able to disrupt medicine and its traditional market. We will be covering our journey as we keep up with the demands of the product vision in detail and in depth.

For example, we’ll delve into our recent architectural changes and how we migrated from a server-rendered PHP monolith to micro-services featuring PHP, Python, Go, Scala and JavaScript connected by GraphQL to a cutting-edge frontend stack revolving around on React and Apollo.

I hope you are as excited about following the AMBOSS Engineering, Product & Design blog as we are in writing the stories. And, of course, we would love to hear from you, so you’re always welcome to drop us a note and have a chat to learn more, give feedback and ask us questions!