Welcome to Grammarly’s New Engineering Blog

Welcome to Grammarly’s new and improved engineering blog on Medium, where we’ll share details about the engineering work being done at Grammarly. As the Vice President of Engineering, it’s my goal for this blog to showcase both the technical challenges we solve and how we approach organizational issues such as building out teams, setting goals, working cross-functionally, and working across multiple offices (San Francisco, Kyiv, and New York) so our users and future Grammarly employees can get a holistic picture of what it’s like building products at a leader in the communication assistant space.

I’ve been at Grammarly a little over four months now. Since joining, I’ve been blown away by the company’s dedication to its mission to improve lives by improving communication, all while maintaining a high bar for our core values (ethics, adaptability, grit, empathy, and remarkability).

You might be wondering a bit more about me. I’ll save you a LinkedIn search, but feel free to send me a message if you’d like to chat more about our company. Here’s a high-level explainer:

• My first job was an internship working in a database team at Microsoft. After grad school, I joined the team I’d interned on and worked on different distributed systems problems for a little over seven years.
• I moved on to lead the personalized product recommendations team at Amazon for nearly four years. My last year at Amazon was spent helping bootstrap what became Amazon Go, a cashier-less store, where I focused on computer vision problems. Fun fact: An Amazon Go store just opened up by Grammarly’s office in San Francisco. It’s a great thing to see that work come to fruition.
• I then moved out to the Bay Area five years ago to lead teams working on the Home Timeline at Twitter. This included infrastructure, UX, and machine learning teams.
• Most recently, I led engineering for a product analytics startup called Mixpanel. I had the opportunity to help scale that team from about 14 engineers to about five times that size over a three-year period.

I love working at companies where the problem space is well-defined but the challenges and opportunities are unbounded. I also drift towards companies that solve a problem that I can easily relate to.

Grammarly checks all of those boxes and more.

I read a lot and used to write fiction for fun. I loved my creative writing classes at the University of Washington. So being able to help build a tool that helps millions of people write clearly — and sharing the experience of building it on this blog — is right up my alley.

Growing up in India, I was lucky to have had coaching and tools to communicate effectively in English. I think that was a huge advantage for my own growth. For the majority of people who don’t have access to personalized coaching, Grammarly is a masterful tool in helping democratize communication. It helps create a level playing field with great ideas and conviction, even if they didn’t start out with the innate skill of being able to communicate effectively in English.

Grammarly’s engineering team has built an elegant product that reaches millions of users every day, across many different interfaces. In addition to continually improving the intelligence powering the product, we’ve designed and built services that have a relatively low operational overhead in terms of time spent on maintaining services or handling outages.

Our team is scrappy, full of generalist engineers who have had to quickly build new domain expertise. For instance, a couple of backend engineers figured out how to build the first few releases of our iOS keyboard app. It’s a joy to be around people who take on this type of initiative on a daily basis.

As we focus on the next five years of our growth and beyond, we’re focused on building the team so we can do many things in parallel across largely autonomous teams. This requires us to have engineers with more focused domain expertise.

Our team looks forward to sharing more details on this blog about how we solve particular technical challenges and explain why we made technical and product decisions. We also want to touch more on engineering leadership, both formal (management) and informal (technical leadership, mentoring). These are critical areas for us as we expand the company in San Francisco and Kyiv.

We’re excited to post on Medium, which in our eyes is the perfect platform for content creation and distribution. We’ve also been compatible with Medium since September!

And for those readers who want to learn more about life at Grammarly, we’re hiring! We have a variety of roles in San Francisco and will have teams that are rapidly growing in the next few months.

Our browser extensions team is one to watch. This relatively small team tackles multiple tasks, including experimenting with and implementing new Natural Language Processing/Machine Learning-based functionality, fixing cross-browser compatibility issues, ensuring user and data privacy, and continually expanding our ubiquity. They’re the brains behind our recent Google Docs product launch. A large percentage of our 15 million daily active users have come to know Grammarly via our extension across multiple browsers.

In a similar vein, our Android team also features promising opportunities. The group owns Grammarly’s Android keyboard app. There’s plenty of compelling opportunities on this team’s roadmap. We look forward to them experimenting and shipping new features that will help our users communicate more effectively.

Lastly, our NLP/ML continues to grow. We’ll be looking for more engineers with academic or applied experience in these areas.

Want to learn more about Grammarly? Want to work with us? Please visit our careers page to learn more about what we have to offer.