Our Best-kept Secret
What sets Guaranteed Rate apart from other mortgage companies.
Guaranteed Rate (yes, the mortgage company) has always been known for low mortgage rates and excellent customer service.
What you probably don’t know is that we have a Chicago-based office of 120+ designers, engineers, and security experts building tools to make the mortgage process seamless.
In the GR Technology organization, we’ve got 3 main goals:
- Empower our borrowers by reducing time to get “Clear to Close”
- Give our loan officers superpowers with custom tooling
- Ensure our engineers have the right tools to build awesome software
This purpose of this blog is to give you an inside peak into our world of building technology that equips our employees, pleases our borrowers, and facilitates billions of dollars in home loans per month.
Let’s talk tech
Over the past 5 years, Guaranteed Rate has invested millions of dollars in building a dedicated in-house engineering team focused on pushing the mortgage industry forward.
As a team we’ve centralized on a few core technologies. Here’s a couple topics you can expect to see us write about.
Design
Development
- JavaScript, we’re no strangers to the new lingua franca
- Go, we’re all about using the right tool for the job. In the DevOps world, we’re all in on Go.
- Clojure, At Guaranteed Rate, we’re committed to functional programming. Fast, predictable, debug-able, and battle-tested, Clojure is the backbone of our service-oriented architecture.
- ClojureScript, JS interoperability with the power of Clojure? Yes please! We love ClojureScript so much we’re using it to build a React Native app.
Deployment
- AWS, we’re doing especially novel things with ClojureScript lambdas
- Docker
- Kubernetes
Let’s talk leadership
Leadership at GR is so important to us that we want to talk about it separately from any individual tool we use. For our size, we’re a crazy flat organization that values autonomy. Teams and tactical initiatives are self-managed, and the engineering leaders rarely have to join daily stand-ups. Here’s a couple examples of our initiatives:
- Every engineer has the opportunity to participate in and present at our weekly architecture meeting
- Every engineer has the ability to create, pick, and modify their own stories to accomplish
- Every engineer creates their own annual career development goals and tracks their progress with the leadership team
- Your working hours are up to you, just communicate your plans effectively with your team
We’re a group of smart, ambitious adults and we take ownership of our work.
Let’s talk learning
Like leadership, learning is a priority and point of pride here at GR. We host technology-focused lunch-and-learns, entire days dedicated to learning about the mortgage industry, and we even started our Clojure training program called Clojure University (CjU).
In fact, every new engineer at Guaranteed Rate spends their first month engaged in weekly Clojure lectures focused on tooling, language features, and deployment. You might even build your own LISP interpreter :)
Well…
That’s all we have for this inaugural post, stay tuned for more insights into our tech, product, leadership, and learning journey.
Guaranteed Rate is actively hiring engineers, product managers, designers, and security folk. If you want to solve hard problems with cool tech, check out our careers page or send us a message about why you’re interested to techrecruiting@rate.com.
