Life of a Botify Engineer (pt. 1)
At Botify we love the tech we build, but most of all we love the people we are building it with. Instead of our usual blog posts about our stack and our technical challenges, we wanted to take some time to write about our team, who they are and what they do.
In this Q&A series, we will present members of our Engineering team, starting in this article with Léa Schwartz (Quality Assurance Engineer) and Noël Martin (Senior Data Engineer).
At Botify we’re very proud of our team members’ wide diversity of backgrounds. From the fresh-out-of-school web developers to the academic masterminds, from the converted philosophers to the oil industry engineers, Botify casts its nets far and wide into a sea of talents because we strongly believe that makes our team and product better: diversity is our strength, pride in our work is our common ground.
What brought you to Botify?
Léa: After my mechatronics studies, I joined a large French industry. Although the final product was very interesting, I found that the development processes were rather long, and the hierarchy was too rigid. What attracted me to Botify was its start-up spirit: human-sized teams that interact well with each other, and managers/co-founders that are readily available for discussion. Moreover, Botify offered me the opportunity to change career and enter the world of web and SEO. I was really flattered that Botify took the risk of hiring me considering I didn’t know anything about SEO. I was really looking forward to learning more with a motivated and close team.
Noël: I did a Ph.D. thesis in astrophysics, then a post-doctoral fellowship. During these studies I discovered and implemented high-performance computing and machine learning methods for physics in general. They opened to me the world of data science and engineering, thus I decided to continue my career in the private sector. I first spent years building a search engine within a French startup concerned about privacy on the Internet. I found Botify by chance while looking at opportunities on LinkedIn. The HR team answered promptly, kindly and the screening questions were relevant. This first exchange was so motivating. Then I met the technical team with passionate and smart members! I recall that during the interviews, we often got off-topic to speak passionately about numerical methods and implementation limits. Botify was an opportunity for me to discover the other side of the search engines, namely search engine optimization. Now, I am working as a Senior Data Engineer, in a nice and talented team!
What’s a typical day like for you?
Léa: I am a Quality Assurance Engineer. This means that before anything can be deployed on production environments, I check that it works as expected and that it has no adverse effects on the rest of the application. We mostly do manual testing, which consists in behaving like any of our users on the app, but automated testing is gaining traction at Botify too! In addition to finding issues after development, I also work with developers and the product during the feature design process, to identify blocking points beforehand.
Noël: I usually start my day with a coffee and checking all Slack messages I missed. Then it’s time to monitor what happens in all the subjects I cover since the day before. I’m in charge of multiple subjects, but one of them was to develop a whole new feature named EngagementAnalytics. Our challenge was to import multiple heterogeneous data sources into our database. But these sources return raw data that has to be processed and consolidated to populate our tables. I had the responsibility of designing and implementing the whole feature, from the settings management, the distribution and the steps of data processing, to the API endpoint. Thus, on a typical day, I solve technical challenges, code, review code from peers, and synchronize my work with other squad mates. Among my daily duty, I am also leading a colleague who joined me on the feature I develop. It consists of multiple messages per day and/or virtual meetings, to answer their questions, challenge them on the next steps, follow their global progression, speak and joke about everything else — from weather, to how to listen to satellites!
What are you excited about?
Léa: I love finding bugs before they can reach production, but I also love when there aren’t any, what a dilemma! On the one hand, finding bugs is rewarding and shows the importance of QA, but on the other hand, not finding bugs also means that we’ve achieved something as a team and that it’s ready to be released to our customers. This teamwork, sharing of knowledge, and recognition of each other is a great source of well-being at work on a daily basis.
Noël: What I love the most is to create something new from scratch until it is production-ready. I love to start thinking about a new subject, its challenges, its edge cases, and drawing some diagrams to make it more real. Then it’s time to start coding, testing these prototypal implementations. Here at Botify, this opportunity is even more exciting because we have to manage a big amount of data, which levels up the complexity of the problems to solve! In addition, the team is prolific and a lot of new subjects are planned to be developed!
This concludes the first part of our Q&A series. If you want to learn more about us, there is now a Part 2, featuring two more of our awesome engineers.
If you’d like to join us, feel free to look at our open positions!
