Why You Will Love Building Software at Collage.com
- Creating the best place to develop software is our number one priority so that we can attract and retain the best engineers.
- We consider technology to be our main differentiator as a business, so we invest heavily in quality and staying at the forefront of engineering practices.
- We are 100% remote and always have been, so everything we do is remote-friendly, and you are judged solely by the quality and timeliness of your work.
- All engineering leaders (including both co-CEOs) are experienced software engineers who understand what you go through each day.
- We dislike chaos and aggressively fix problems that cause fires so that engineers can spend as much time as possible building new things.
- Everyone is encouraged to help others first, so you will always be supported and unblocked.
- We almost exclusively hire senior engineers, so everyone has autonomy and you will be surrounded with peers who will challenge you and help you learn.
- Engineers work closely with product managers to solve problems for customers and define our product.
- We use data to make decisions, so the best ideas win, regardless of who came up with them.
- We share evidence and reasoning for our decisions, so everyone has transparency and the opportunity to provide feedback.
- Our in-house US-based customer service team is well-trained and provides excellent feedback to engineering about bugs and other issues.
- We have a great data analysis team and granular event tracking, so you can get detailed and accurate information about customer behavior.
- We spend wisely, so you will have the best tools to do your job.
- We meet up in person twice a year, and it’s a lot of fun (hackathons, games, bars, karaoke, and more!)
Our Processes and Tech Stack
- We follow scrum agile processes with two-week sprints and daily stand-ups.
- We communicate primarily over Slack and Google Meet, often sharing screens to do coe pairing.
- We use Git + Github for version control and code review.
- Our tech stack is React + mobx-state-tree on the front end (we are in the process of migrating from Backbone and about halfway done), PHP on the back end, and AWS for all of our infrastructure.
- Our site is mobile-first and fully responsive.
- We use continuous deployment with fully automated build and testing processes via Jenkins, automatically launching after each merge, typically several times per day.
- Our development environment is easy to install and uses Docker.
- Our production environment is well-instrumented with NewRelic, CloudWatch, TrackJs, and other systems to provide great visibility and rapid feedback on technical problems.
- Our ecommerce front-end is a single application developed in-house, but we have separate back-end services for processing images and handling order fulfillment.
Our Teams
Ecommerce
The ecommerce team handles all of our landing and product pages, as well as the checkout flow. They are also responsible for a variety of internal systems like coupons, promotions, pricing, and product management.
Designs
The designs team manages everything related to the different designs customers can choose for their products on product pages and in the builder tool, as well as rendering designs on products.
Personalization
The personalization team focuses on the tools that customers use to make their product their own inside of the builder tool, and also handles most of the internal logic related to projects.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure team is responsible for dev ops, site operations, our print product fulfillment systems with third-party vendors (all of our printing is done by third parties), as well as various supporting systems and technologies.