Driving the Future of Car Sharing: Turo’s Engineering Team on Embracing Growth While Maintaining Culture
Since the peer-to-peer car sharing service debuted in 2010, Turo has expanded from Cambridge, MA, to more than 5,500 cities in 56 countries and counting. Turo’s Engineering team has always played a crucial role in the company’s success — and now they’re gearing up for some serious growth. Paul Velez (Engineering Director), Victor Mora (Lead Frontend Engineer), Catherine Patchell (Frontend Engineer), and Mazen Ammar (Senior Backend Engineer) explain what brought them to Turo, how the company aligns with their values, and why they’re so passionate about what lies ahead.
What does Turo do and why does it matter?
Paul: Turo puts the world’s 1 billion vehicles to better use. Cars are some of our most expensive purchases, and on average they sit around 23 hours a day — which is a colossal waste of money and space. Our platform turns those vehicles into utilized assets.
Catherine: From the user perspective, we serve a range of needs. Some people have one car and just use Turo to pay it off. A few have 100 or more cars, and Turo is a core part of their livelihood.
What do you do at Turo and what led you here?
Victor: I’m a full-stack engineer on the Growth team. I came to Turo from Spain, through a program that connects young engineers with internships in the U.S. San Francisco is such an exciting place to be — I’ve stayed two and a half years, and I have no regrets.
“When we build something at Turo, I can see how our work improves the customer experience. It feels like everything I do matters.” — Paul
Catherine: I’m a frontend engineer on the Host team. Turo is my first job out of college, and the opportunities to learn and grow here were part of the draw. I also talked with another female engineer during the interview process who said the team was a great, supportive group of people. That was really important in making my decision. I spent my first year and a half in our Cambridge office, but I grew up and went to school on the east coast, and I was ready to explore a new city. I didn’t want to leave Turo, so they gave me the chance to transfer out here to San Francisco, and it’s been great.
Mazen: I’m a backend engineer on the Host team with Catherine and Paul. This was also my first job out of college, so the learning opportunities Catherine mentioned were important to me, too. I’m always working on something new here — within the first year, I went from learning basic best practices to implementing Kubernetes.
Paul: I lead the Host Experience team. I’m focused on helping drive projects forward and making sure everyone stays aligned. My background is a bit different; my company was acquired by Turo about three years ago. For me, the choices came down to Google, Yahoo, and Turo, and I felt like my contributions would make a bigger difference here. I’ve worked for a lot of behemoth companies like IBM, American Express, Chase Bank, and Bank of America. At places like that, you accomplish tasks, but you don’t see the output — you’re a cog in a wheel. When we build something at Turo, I can see how our work improves the customer experience. Hosts reach out to us on Facebook to thank us for updates, for example. And internally, we can see how those changes affect Turo’s profitability. It feels like everything I do matters.
What’s your day to day like?
Paul: We do two-week sprints, with check-ins on off weeks to see how things are going. We do daily standups, too. On my teams, we also have “The Code Zone” every day from 2 to 6 p.m. That’s our dedicated, uninterrupted time to focus on our work, which I think is hugely valuable for engineers.
Catherine: Absolutely. Having that heads-down time in the afternoon is great. The rest of the day varies; I usually come in between 9:30 and 10:30 and often have a few meetings before lunch.
How is your team structured, and how do you collaborate?
Paul: We are organized in five domains according to business function, and engineers of every discipline collaborate with our product designers to solve problems and move metrics. Hosts and Guests are the primary domains, because those are the two sides of Turo’s marketplace. Another is Growth; that team focuses on getting people to the website or to install the app. We also have SIN, or Seeds, International, and New Business, which is responsible for launching international markets and considering new types of vehicles for the platform. Then there’s the Platform team, which provides the underlying technology infrastructure that allows the other domains to keep development velocity up.
Catherine: We work closely with the Design and Product teams on a daily basis. Every team has at least one product representative, which gives engineers a lot of opportunities to really influence what we’re building.
“I really value the level of trust and transparency here. When things are good, you’re going to know it. If things are going poorly, you’re going to know that, too.” — Victor
We also have guilds, which are groups of engineers organized by discipline — iOS, Android, frontend, and backend. Guilds are great places to share ideas, ask each other for help, and sync on how we’re building things. They help us maintain a consistent code base.
What’s exciting about the technologies you’re working with?
Victor: I like that Turo follows agile methodologies — there are fewer processes. Other companies where I’ve worked used waterfall methodologies, so we spent a lot of time writing documentation and running quality analyses like ISO 9000 before doing anything else. Here, there’s a nice balance between moving fast and doing things right.
“Our growth is going to lead to some great engineering opportunities, and I’m confident we’ll keep our culture as we scale.” — Mazen
Catherine: On the frontend, we’re working with the latest technologies, like React, and we’re focused on trends that keep us on the bleeding edge of what’s relevant.
Mazen: In the backend world, we’re in the process of moving our monolith to microservices, which is both exciting and challenging.
Paul: Everything we do is designed to move the product forward. We try to limit creating new technology just for the sake of it, but there are cases when that’s necessary. And we use those opportunities to promote team members and showcase their work. Mazen wrote a blog post about our move to Kubernetes, for example, and he’s going to speak about it at an upcoming convention.
Catherine: We also have hackathons twice a year during Turbo Week, which is when all the offices from around the world get together.
Victor: And the things we build during Turbo Week have become real product features on Turo! At my first hackathon, we built “search by color,” which we’re using today and has been covered by TechCrunch.
Tell us about the technical challenges your team is facing.
Catherine: We do take on more tech debt as we grow and introduce changes. We don’t always have time to update the code across the board. But we’ve started to be more proactive about setting time aside to that will reduce our tech debt.
Mazen: Our move to microservices is exciting, but it comes with challenges, too. As our monolith grows in size, engineering progress is slowed by the use of giant test suites. We want to carve that up into separate services, so we can run a specific part of the test suite. So when we interview candidates, we’re interested in hearing not only what they know about microservices, but also how they think and why. We want to move through this migration deliberately and understand each choice we make along the way so we can test it, prove it out, and architect it properly
What’s the culture like at Turo?
Victor: I really value the level of trust and transparency here, which I haven’t seen at other companies. When things are good, you’re going to know it. If things are going poorly, you’re going to know that, too. That openness is awesome.
“We work closely with the Design and Product teams on a daily basis. Engineers have a lot of opportunities to really influence what we’re building.” — Catherine
Mazen: Yeah, Turbo Week is a good example. The first part of the week involves presentations from the various organizations within Turo, from Engineering to Finance to Customer Support. Then there are panels with our board and community of users, which is a really cool opportunity to ask questions and have candid conversations about ways we can improve.
Paul: I think our career progression paths say a lot about our culture, too. We’re different from a lot of other companies in that you don’t need to manage people in order to move up; there’s also a career path for those who want to be individual contributors. We bifurcate Engineering into the stewards of the organization and the stewards of the technology, and the two are seen as equals. As you progress, you have the opportunity to try both.
Tell us about your experience as Turo has grown.
Victor: Since I joined, the team has almost doubled — but I still feel like my contributions here are meaningful. As an individual contributor, I have a real impact on the product.
Mazen: The growth aspect is both scary and exciting, because there’s a lot of heavy scaling required to stay on the trajectory we want, and we need to balance that with paying attention to culture. We have a dedicated group of engineers who are working on this, called the Culture guild.
Paul: The Culture guild explicitly excludes managers so that our culture comes from the bottom up.
Mazen: I’ve heard friends at other companies say their perks and culture make up for unfulfilling work. Here, I’m excited about the work, and the culture is an added bonus. I think our growth is going to lead to some great engineering opportunities, and I’m confident we’ll keep our culture as we scale.
Interested in joining the team? Check out open positions or email Senior Technical Recruiter Gianni Longmire at gianni@turo.com.
Editor’s Note: To help tell this story, we partnered with Job Portraits, a creative studio that tells stories about fast-growth companies.
