Hello World: Introducing Freelancer’s blog

Welcome to Freelancer Limited’s Engineering & Data Science blog. Our aim for this blog is to showcase the interesting technical challenges we face and overcome across our group of companies (which include Freelancer.com, Escrow.com, Warrior Forum, StartCon, Freemarket & Fantero). From an engineering perspective, the two most challenging companies within the group are Freelancer.com & Escrow.com.

Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing and crowd-sourcing marketplace by the total number of users and projects posted. More than 28 million registered users have posted over 14 million projects and contests to date in over 1,000 areas as diverse as website development, logo design, marketing, copywriting, astrophysics, aerospace engineering and manufacturing. We love building, maintaining and running open source solutions to solve our technical challenges — from serving over 80,000 QPS on MySQL, sending more than 12m emails/day through our custom MTAs or collecting over 350m log events/day into our ELK stack.

Escrow.com is the leading provider of secure online payments and online transaction management for consumers and businesses on the Internet with over US$3.5 billion in transactions secured. Founded in 1999, Escrow.com has a rich technical history and after joining the Freelancer group through an acquisition in 2015 we have spent a lot of time modernizing the platform — projects have included migrating infrastructure to AWS, dockerizing environments and retiring legacy Windows backend systems in favour of Python web applications to name but a few.

At heart, we are a tech company headquartered in Sydney and it is our incredible engineering team that drives our business. We’ve expanded our global reach and now have staff across offices located in Australia (Sydney), Philippines (Manila), Canada (Vancouver), United Kingdom (London), United States (San Francisco) and Argentina (Buenos Aires). We love building and running cloud-based architectures — having been a devoted AWS user since May 2009. Scaling from 300,000 users to 28,000,000 users has been a fun (and daunting) challenge and we intend to use this blog to share the details of our approaches and the technical challenges we overcome.

Thank you for reading and participating in the conversation!

- Peter Phillips, VP of Engineering