MatchCraft’s adVantage platform is not only battle-tested but also constantly evolving to meet and exceed the needs of our reseller & agency clients and their local advertisers. And the people behind this constant innovation are the members of our Engineering team.
What Does The Engineering Team Do?
Our Engineering team spans the globe and has members that work with each other across several time zones. This 20-member strong team builds, tests and enhances our platform to offer best-in-class online advertising tools to our clients.
Getting To Know Them
We asked the team to share some tidbits about themselves:
- Reema, who is a mom of 2, is very good at transitioning between a big kid and a parent when interacting with her little ones. Also, every piece of art in her home has been painted by either her or her 6 year old. She refuses to buy art, which means that most of the walls in her house are bare and waiting!
- Jay finds sudden loud noises like balloons & fireworks absolutely terrifying.
- Sergio is a tea lover.
- Scott likes to herd sheep with his dog. He is currently trying to learn to play the piano and hopes to get back to playing the violin.
- Rui, who is afraid of reptiles, let his son keep a lizard as a pet. However, he absolutely adores German Shepherds and is always looking to pet any and every German Shepherd he may come across.
- Even though Alhely has been practicing ballet for almost 13 years, she cannot do push-ups. She has three dogs who love Roomba vacuums (DJ Roomba, anyone?).
- Ash is an avid gardener and enjoys maintaining his vegetable garden.
- Before Jilesh became entrenched in the fine art of coding, he performed on the Indian national radio and acted in plays as a mimicry artist. During his time off, he likes to travel within India and his favorite destination is Goa.
- Joe, who still stays in touch with his college roommate from 40 years ago by playing video games with him every weekend, used to be a cycling enthusiast and would ride 100 miles at a time.
- Another fan of bicycling is Kinjal, who says that he simply cannot live without it.
- Part way through his career, Alex made the bold move to quit his job and go travel with no fixed return date!
- Harish enjoys trekking and has completed several treks in Maharashtra’s (India) Sahyadris region.
- Kevin N. grew up on a farm where he used to herd water buffaloes and ducks. He now enjoys keeping up with emerging technologies, watching European soccer, drinking strong beer, and tasting single malt whiskey. He also runs every day to keep his mind fresh and burn those calories.
- Kuntal has scaled Everest, not just once, but twice!!! 29,000 feet, -50C!
What They Love About Their Roles
They let us in on the insider scoop on what makes their jobs fun:
- Flexibility & Versatility – The team really enjoys the flexibility their roles offer, whether it’s the remote work capabilities or the freedom to creatively analyze ways to code and design the system. They also love the fact that they are able to work on a variety of new tasks and address unique challenges, enabling them to constantly learn new things.
- Solution Finder – Members of the team truly relish putting on their thinking caps to chase problems and find logical solutions to them. The cherry on top is seeing those solutions be used. It gives them a sense of accomplishment.
- Team Dynamic – Members of our Engineering team very much respect each other and the work they all do. Some version of the phrase “working with smart & friendly colleagues” was voiced by almost all the team members.
- Design Decisions – The team takes part in the creation of new platform features all the way from the design stage. This helps them not only innovate in every part of the development cycle but also learn multiple aspects of the business and its needs.
- Cross-Departmental Interaction – The Engineering team also participates in activities such as client onboarding, which gives them the opportunity to interact with a lot of different people outside the realm of engineering.
- Efficient Tools – But the best part of their jobs is knowing that the products created by them are helping people do better search engine marketing (SEM) by improving their work efficiency.
Top Challenges
Even though the above list is long and promising, the team also faces some challenges every now and then.
- Problem Solving – Our Engineering team likes to do things preemptively – whether it’s launching new features or solving problems. And so one of the main challenges is anticipating potential issues and proposing the best solutions to address them in a time and resource efficient manner.
- Staying Informed – While working in a world where continuous change takes precedence over all else, it can be tough to keep up with all the new technologies, their usage & best practices. Doing so requires self-discipline – making sure that one takes the time to connect with teams and communities across the globe to always keep learning.
- Adaptability – One of the top challenges is keeping the work schedule flexible enough to accept new changes. Every change made to our system has the potential to introduce new defects in it. So our engineers must always stay open to ad hoc problem solving. It can also be challenging to constantly work on enhancing our adVantage platform in order to stay adaptable to external changes.
- System Design – When implementing a new feature, it is important to weigh the pros and cons of different programming design patterns. The challenge lies in figuring out the impact on our platform and monitoring the changes to avoid regression issues. The goal is to design APIs that are easy to use and customize.
- Talent Pool – It can sometimes be a challenge to find talented engineers that can successfully work on developing our platform.
- A Balancing Act – In general, juggling work and family life can be a challenge, even more so during the current times.
If Not An Engineer Then What
- Joe said that if we had asked him this question 40 years ago he would’ve said an NBA player.
- Alex believes he would’ve been a teacher, teaching some or the other topic of interest.
- Kevin N. would’ve been a physicist.
- Kuntal would most likely have been selling soy milk or climbing more mountains.
- Before Sergio ventured into the field of engineering, he was planning on pursuing dentistry.
- Reema thinks she would’ve been a painter or maybe a librarian, seeing as to how she loves the smell of old books.
- Ash would’ve been trying to figure out what to do with his life.
- Alhely, who is a trained ballet dancer, would probably have been a ballet dancer/teacher.
- Jay might’ve explored his love of coffee making by becoming a barista.
- Rui, who shares his beautiful snapshots regularly with the entire MatchCraft team, would’ve delved in nature and street photography.
- Scott doesn’t have a clue but thinks that Neuroscience might’ve been a fun endeavor.
- Jilesh, who is a student of statistics, might’ve been working at a bank.
Why Engineering?
From wanting to learn how to use their parents’ laptops, to writing their first pieces of code in 8th grade, there are many things that drew the members of our Engineering team to this field.
Their love of technology is obvious but what they also enjoy is being the people with the answers. The constant opportunity to learn new things and solve problems analytically, using mathematical constructs, is also a plus!
The potential to innovate, and the sheer wonder of what one can create using just a computer, keeps them going. They like producing technology that makes humans more efficient in their work by reducing cognitive loads.
“Ironically, the number of women participating seems to have gone down over the years. I don’t have hard statistics, but I remember there being more women in the field when I was starting compared to now,” said Alex.
Software engineering has become popular over the years and has even entered popular culture (watched Silicon Valley yet?)
The craft of software development itself has become a lot more agile. It has evolved from using directory structures to maintain code, to designing pipelines for version control, automated testing & deployment of the code.
And the technology being used has also drastically changed, from the languages used for coding to the size & capabilities of the computers themselves (from room-sized computers to mobile phones that can run millions of lines of code super efficiently).