Tophatter Engineering: From the Culture to the Interview

At Tophatter, I spend a lot of time talking to prospective engineers on the phone and in-person. Below are questions that often come up when we decide if there is a mutual fit. Hopefully, this post helps you as you prepare to connect with our team.

Why are engineers excited about working at Tophatter?

The answer differs for everyone, but a strong theme for many is our focus on growth and our team mentality. In short, we are a fast growing startup, focused on our people in the center of an industry that is currently reshaping our world.

Tophatter by the numbers:

• $35M in funding from CRV, Goodwater Capital, and August Capital
• A global employee footprint: 5 offices in 3 countries
• 28M app downloads, across 14 countries
• Shoppers win 75k+ products a day from over 5k sellers
• 10M ad impressions on Facebook, Google, TV, and other advertising channels per day

Our collaboration space is perfect to get away from your desk or to have an informal meeting

About the team

• Our engineering ethos is about supporting individual contributors to make a big impact. We learn, do, and learn some more.
• Our engineering team is growing across our San Francisco, Portland, and Bangalore offices. With our global engineering force, we are contributing code 24 hours a day.
• Our founders met as computer science undergrads at Stanford where the VP of engineering (that’s me!) was their TA.

Some of the product and engineering team members holding a quick standup to check in

What’s the tech stack?

• Ruby on Rails provides all of our API endpoints to our Android and iOS mobile application. We now use React for our web app and React Native for our mobile app. Our transition to React was a big undertaking from our whole eng org that improved our development and release velocity and broke down silos within the team.
• We’re using CircleCI for continuous integration and deployment, and Kubernetes to automate scaling and deployment.
• Our main application database is MySQL, and we employ Redshift for heavy querying and analytics.
• Our data pipeline is built using PySpark and we use Airflow for scheduling jobs.
• Every engineer has push access to production. Ownership is one of our core company values — more on that later.

How does the engineering team operate?

We currently operate in a weekly sprint. Everyone decides who works on what from a pool of tasks. These selections are made taking into account an engineer’s interests, and energy around and urgency of the project. This system prevents knowledge silos, and everyone is able to grow because they never focus on a specific area/domain for too long. It also enables us to move fast and course correct quickly, when needed.

What are the opportunities for growth?

• We conduct weekly one-on-one meetings between all managers and their managees, so you’ll be receiving honest, consistent, and direct feedback on a regular basis.
• We review every pull request, and mentor junior engineers as we go.
• We do annual performance reviews, but we’ve also promoted engineers on a shorter time frame when they’ve consistently met the expectations outlined in our engineering rubric.
• If you are proactive and demonstrate success in your role, you will be rewarded with more responsibility and ownership. We are always looking for more engineers to help with recruiting, product roadmaps, and mentorship. You will always feel challenged and pushed to slightly outside your comfort zone at Tophatter — knowing you have the support of the team behind you.

The engineering interview process

The interview process consists of practical exercises that mirror our day-to-day work. We want to evaluate you in your most comfortable and ideal environment, so please do bring your laptop with all your favorite tools and IDEs set up. Below is the usual flow:

Introductory call

Get to know each other and hear about your experience (15–30 minutes)

Technical phone screen

Takes place on Coderpad. You can choose to interview in Ruby, Python, or Javascript. (60 minutes)

Technical onsite

A typical interview looks something like this (4–5 hours)

Bug Squash

• Find and squash the bug in a popular open source tool hosted on Github.
• We are looking for familiarity with Git, fluency in debugging or a debugging tool, along with the ability to get familiar with an unfamiliar code base within a short time.

Refactoring

• Read and rewrite some code that is intentionally messy in Coderpad. Here is a good video on refactoring in general to help you prep.

Project

• Build your own project using the language of your choice. We’ll provide the details of what we’ll work on and you’ll decide how to implement it.
• You could showcase your skills on building something really quick and then architecting and designing it to make it scale and production ready.

Lunch break

• This is a perfect time to ask any questions you have while eating good food with some of the team.

Get to know us better

• Have an informal chat about how you like to work and what you’re looking for in your next job.

What’s it like to work at Tophatter?

Our values guide our work and how our team comes together. We focus on building a strong culture that brings together different orgs and disciplines. Do you see yourself in some of these values?

Hunger #heart

We have a burning desire to succeed.
We put in the work to get better every day.
We are resilient in the face of challenges.
We operate with urgency.

Ownership #care

We take pride in our craft.
We treat the company as if it were our own.
We hold ourselves fully responsible.
We show initiative.

Courage #guts

We have a bias for action.
We challenge assumptions.
We embrace difficult conversations.
We often operate with uninformed optimism.

Humility #humble

We don’t hold our beliefs too dearly.
We appreciate a good laugh, especially at our own expense.
We marvel at both good fortune and bad luck.
We respect the sample sizes of our data points.

Mindfulness #aware

We care as much about the how as the what.
We appreciate diverse opinions and personalities.
We are curious and actively seek to understand.
We respect the difference between intention and impact.

Life at Tophatter

• Our workplace is flexible, just get what you need to get done.
• We serve delicious catered lunches 5 days a week and we try to eat together in our lunch area.
• We have unlimited PTO and encourage employees to take the time they need.
• We adjust compensation to meet performance on an annual, and occasionally earlier, basis.
• We provide generous equity to give employees a sense of ownership in the future and outcome of the company.
• In SF, we have an in-office Zen Room where a group meditates everyday at 3:00pm.

Our lunch area, where we eat together everyday

What benefits does Tophatter offer?

In addition to competitive salary and equity, Tophatter offers the following benefits and perks. Note: These perks may be a little different for engineers based outside the US.

• Parental leave: We offer up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave for eligible employees.
• Flexible vacation policy: Take the time you need to disconnect and recharge.
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance and free One Medical membership for you and your dependents.
• Unlimited snacks and drinks
• 401K Plan
• Life & Disability Coverage

About Tophatter

Tophatter is the world’s most entertaining, mobile shopping marketplace.

Combining the engagement of a game with the economics of a marketplace, Tophatter is redefining ecommerce. Tophatter generates over $300 million of annual Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV), and sells 100,000+ items every day.

Tophatter uses AI to tailor the shopping experience, delivering deep discounts on branded and unbranded items directly from factories and warehouses. Popular categories include: jewelry, electronics, fashion & beauty, and home & hobbies.

To date, Goodwater Capital, CRV, August Capital, and others have invested $35 million in the business. The company has offices in San Francisco, Portland, Shanghai, Shenzen, and Bangalore, and is actively hiring.

It’s fun to shop.