Welcome to Posh Engineering

Welcome to the Posh Engineering blog! 🎊 At Posh we’re building web and IVR-based Conversational AI, currently targeted at credit unions and banks. Our chatbots answer customer questions using natural language, providing a more human customer service experience.

Posh’s origins trace back to our founders’ work at MIT’s AI Lab, as part of the Spoken Language Systems group. Spun out in the summer of 2018, our team now consists of talented engineers and researchers working towards our shared goal.

Though we’re a young company, we’re opinionated about what goes into our product! Writing is a great way to share our knowledge and clarify our thought process, and that’s why we’re excited to launch this blog.

Who we are

Posh Engineering is a group of people committed to our mission of building the next generation of Conversational AI. We believe that a dedication towards honing our craft and a passion for technology are an integral part of achieving this goal.

From a product perspective, this means constantly thinking about how we can provide our users with a remarkable chatbot experience. From NLP algorithms for intent recognition, to backend services with low latency, to an intuitive conversational design — our engineering team is always looking for ways to improve our product across the stack.

We also recognize the importance of personal growth. With weekly research seminars led by our NLP team, and monthly growth days where all engineers spend the day learning about a topic that interests them, Posh provides an environment where learning is a real priority. After all, when innovating on the bleeding edge, investing into our own learning is a necessity; we’re literally exploring an uncharted frontier!

What we do

Building at a product-led company like ours involves working closely with teams across the stack. From our NLU algorithms, to our backend services, to our frontend design — collaboration is a key part of our building process.

There are 4 main groups our engineering work falls under:

• NLP Engineering: A fundamental tradeoff in Artificial Intelligence applications is the distinction between rule-based and statistical decision making. Rule-based logic, while hand-written and difficult to scale, is quick and easy to understand. Statistical models, on the other hand, can learn logical rules without being explicitly programmed. That is, of course, if you have vast quantities of high quality data. Our NLP engineering team, while primarily leveraging statistical techniques, designs and implements “the brains” behind our chatbots. We have Masters and PhD talent from top institutions contributing to this facet of our product.
• Platform Engineering: Consisting of gritty software engineers, the platform team builds and maintains the foundation of our SaaS offering. A chatbot application, especially when hosted in a multi-tenant SaaS environment as our own, encompasses much more than immediately meets the eye. There are widgets, dashboards, ETL pipelines, aggregations and analytics, multi-channel adapters, and much more, all managed by our platform team.
• Chatbot Engineering: Our bots aren’t necessarily one-size fits all. While there is overlap in functionality between our credit union customers, customization is always a concern. That’s why we’ve created our own chatbot SDK which we call, “convo”. A good analogy to understand this SDK: while an iOS developer leverages the iOS SDK to build iPhone applications, Posh engineers leverage convo to build chatbot applications.
• Devops Engineering: The unsung heroes of any high-growth software organization. At Posh, we place as much emphasis on developer productivity as product development itself. As features are implemented and shipped at rapid pace, in part to our world-class CI/CD pipelines, security and infrastructure cannot go unchecked.

Our engineering team — a team of 22, and growing fast — works out of our HQ located in the heart of downtown Boston. Currently dispersed across the US and Canada due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our team looks forward to reuniting in person as soon as possible. In the meantime, we’ll continue doing what we do best.

What to expect from the blog

As engineers we’re very passionate about solving complex technical problems. However, so much of our work is also about human problems — collaboration, team cohesion, and personal development. We plan to document our problem-solving journey across all these topics:

• How we launch new products and features
• Our experience using different technologies across our stack
• How we develop ourselves as engineers and people
• Steps we take to build an inclusive, welcoming team environment for all

Be sure to stay up-to-date on all our newest posts by following us here on Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If the work we’re doing at Posh sounds interesting to you, check out all our open positions — we’re entering an exciting time as a company, and we’d love to have you on board!