meet-the-team-engineering
Engineering
Apr 3, 2017

Meet The Team - Engineering

GetYourGuide
Careers Team
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GETYOURGUIDE

Over the last few weeks we have been meeting with various teams within GetYourGuide to gain some insight into what it's like working with each team.

Today, we are chatting with the Engineering Team. The Engineering Team build solutions that make it easy for our customers to find, book, and enjoy great experiences around the world. This ranges from creating beautiful user experience and working on search algorithms, to automating our scalable server infrastructure. We have over 30 engineers working with GetYourGuide, and there are various sub-teams; Marketing Teach team, Partner Tech team, Marketplace team, Mobile Native Apps, Supply Tech team, Data Analytics, Data Engineering team, Data Science team, DevOps team, and Platform team.

We spoke to Oliver Strobel, Director of Engineering, and Rodrigo Neves, Senior Engineering Manager, and they told us all about life in GetYourGuide’s Engineering team.

Oliver Strobel, Director of Engineering.
Oliver Strobel, Director of Engineering.

Can you give us a brief summary of what your team works on?

Oliver Strobel: My team is based in Berlin and Zurich with our focus being customer acquisition.  Our goal is to apply technology to come up with solutions in the realm of online marketing and partnerships.

Rodrigo Neves: The Native Apps team's mission is to dazzle our customers with amazing experiences that make them love our product and enjoy their trips. We explore how we can leverage technology, in particular mobile, to shape the future of travel.

The Supply Tech team works daily to ensure we have all the great activities our customers want to do, when they want to do them, at the best rates possible. We go the extra mile to enable our tour operators to leverage our platform and provide great experiences to our travelers.

Rodrigo Neves, Director of Engineering.
Rodrigo Neves, Director of Engineering.

What advice would you have for someone who wants to work with the engineering team?

Rodrigo Neves: Use our product and come prepared to have a big impact on our customer experience, regardless of the team you are applying for. What drives us is the opportunity to solve travelers’ problems and create memorable experiences, rather than the implementation details of a technical solution.

Oliver Strobel: We are looking for technical folks who have a growth mindset and also an eye on the business.  Be prepared to take on new challenges and have ownership in an agile environment.

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What does an average day in your team look like?

Oliver Strobel: My engineers are spread across various mission teams, each of which holds a daily stand-up.  After this it’s on to the problem solving and coding; we try to keep meetings to a minimum.

Rodrigo Neves:  We use agile methodologies, slightly flexible per team, so the day typically starts with a stand-up gathering of the whole team to sync on what progress we made so far and what is coming next. Then we break out into work units, sometimes individuals, sometimes in smaller groups, which focus on delivering towards a specific objective. We launch a lot of small tests to validate our hypothesis, then observe, learn, and iterate based on data analysis

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What is your team currently working on? Is there an issue your team is currently trying to solve?

Rodrigo Neves:  The Native Apps team is working very closely with our local ground operations teams to explore the ideal experience for our customers in destination and make it very easy for local operators to provide a distinguished experience to the GetYourGuide customers.

The Supply Tech team is focusing on creating tooling for both inbound and outbound API connections to our partners that enable them to easily maintain and update their products, pricing and availability in our system, thus ensuring that we have all the important activities our customers love always available, right up to the last minute.

Oliver Strobel: It is all about scale and automation. We are building a variety of systems and it’s important to keep the future in mind.

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What, if any, are the principles that your team lives by?

Oliver Strobel: "Move quick and break things!"  We are super focused on growth and there is an understanding that along the way things will break, fail, or generally not go as planned.

Rodrigo Neves: We strongly believe in a very open feedback culture, as a tool to keep us growing and improving. Furthermore, we rely on sharing ownership in responsibilities across all team members. We respectfully hold each other accountable and work as a team to achieve ambitious goals

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What is your favorite thing about working with the GetYourGuide engineering team?

Rodrigo Neves: The most important thing for me is the scale of the positive impact we can have in people's lives. Nothing is more rewarding than trying out our product on the ground and seeing lots of happy GetYourGuide customers making great memories they will cherish for many years to come.

Oliver Strobel: Both the engineering department and the company as a whole are very agile.  There is a culture of customer value delivery, pushing ahead and learning from our failures.

Big thanks again to Oliver Strobel, Rodrigo Neves, and to the whole Engineering team at GetYourGuide who took the time out of their very busy

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