Here’s why these 5 LA companies think they have the best devs in town

by Joyce Famakinwa
October 16, 2018

With a mix of established tech titans and fast-growing startups alike, the vibrant SoCal tech community is home to some of the most inventive professionals around — a pool of talented techies building solutions to solve the problems of the future.

But don’t take our word for it. We asked around to see why these local tech companies think they have the best developers in town. Here’s what they had to say:

 

Procore team
photo via procore

Procore’s cloud-based construction management software helps their clients manage multiple projects, collaborate with their teams and stay on top of specs, allowing them to tackle major construction projects like hospitals and hotels. According to Senior Director of Engineering Strategy Stephen Westerman, being a master of your craft is crucial and gives the team the ability to mentor the next group of up-and-comers.

 

Why do you think your company has the best developers in town?

Mastery of one’s craft is central to our engineering philosophy at Procore. We encourage our engineers to take time to develop their skills and industry expertise. To that end, we offer skills development courses through our internal dev academy, onsite workshops with industry experts, conference attendance opportunities, construction industry workshops, individual and team coaching, and much more. Our engineering internship program is also a great growth opportunity for our full-time engineers who are able to volunteer to mentor and help develop the skills of the interns. We are intentional about prioritizing learning and development at Procore as we believe this investment in our employees is priceless.

Mastery of one’s craft is central to our engineering philosophy at Procore.”

What challenges are they addressing? What technology are they using to do so?

Construction is a complex industry that has been underserved by the technology sector for decades, and as such, the challenges our engineers tackle are as exciting as they are numerous. Enabling transparency and tight collaboration among all stakeholders on a construction project, making job sites safer, and helping our clients finish their projects on time and within budget are just a few examples of the challenges we tackle day-to-day. Another exciting challenge is delivering our platform to a rapidly growing global audience. This includes our Ruby on Rails and React, Android, iOS and Windows applications, as well as several services built with Elixir. We also strive to provide a robust, open API and to cultivate a thriving ecosystem of integrators and integration partners through our App Marketplace. It's hard to encapsulate all we're tackling in just a few sentences, but catch us in person and we can talk about it for hours.

 

GOAT team
photo via goat

For sneakerheads, GOAT needs no introduction. Its 10 million users and more than 600,000 listings make the company both the largest marketplace for buying and selling valuable sneakers as well as a one-stop shop for rare collector’s items and general releases alike. At GOAT, the team is working to solve multiple tech challenges, so the company champions employees who take ownership of their projects.

 

Why do you think your company has the best developers in town?

Hyung Lee, senior director of mobile: One of the best decisions we made early on was that we should always try to find a place for bright, motivated people. We focus on hiring talented engineers and giving them different opportunities to make an impact; that way, we can ensure that they are most effective and fulfilled. And as a company with challenges ranging from rapid mobile development and big data to warehouse automation and retail technology, we’re uniquely positioned to offer something for everyone. As a result, our team demonstrates tremendous ownership over everything they do, and understands that we’re all delivering more than just lines of code.

We focus on hiring talented engineers and giving them different opportunities to make an impact; that way, we can ensure that they are most effective and fulfilled.”

What challenges is your company solving and with what technology?

Warren Dodge, iOS architect: One of our biggest challenges has been figuring out how to cater to a consumer who not only wants to shop for more sneakers than any one store can possibly hold but who also wants to do so seamlessly from their mobile device. There’s something unique about shopping in a brick-and-mortar store that’s tough to replicate in a mobile-first world, particularly when sneakers are such a visual and personal good. As an online marketplace, we have a unique opportunity to leverage our unrivaled sneaker catalog to solve problems like discovery, curation, recommendations and personalization.

Since our iOS app accounts for the majority of our traffic, we need to release new features rapidly without compromising quality or user experience. To ensure we can deliver on both fronts, we recently rewrote our entire app in Swift using a Data, Context, Interaction (DCI) paradigm and an Immutable Model layer inspired by Pinterest’s Plank. That has given us a flexible foundation without creating paralyzing code bloat.

 

Brainjolt team
photo via brainjolt

Brainjolt knows a thing or two about going viral. The digital media company creates and distributes content to more than 30 million subscribers through its brands, including 22 Words, MagiQuiz and Happiness Heroes. The Brainjolt dev team proves that a smaller staff doesn’t mean lesser results. Instead, the balance of working quickly and intelligently accounts for their success.

 

Why do you think your company has the best developers in town?

Allison Frauenpreis, full stack engineer: Our in-house product team is just two people, and we’re both women, which is unusual for an engineering team and also pretty exciting. We value learning but hate wasting time, and as a result, I think we’re great at balancing working quickly and working intelligently. We focus on finding creative solutions to problems, which involves constant collaboration to make sure we’re getting the best from everyone on every project. Finally, we prioritize and re-prioritize as needed to guarantee the highest return on our time investment.

We focus on finding creative solutions to problems, which involves constant collaboration to make sure we’re getting the best from everyone on every project.”

What challenges are they addressing? What technology are they using to do so?

Karla Silva, project manager: One of the biggest challenges we’ve come up against is communicating with our internal and remote teams. Organization and communication are paramount for agile project management to work. Over the last six months, Allison, myself, and other great women on our team have worked to build bridges via project management systems such Asana and Jira, and by implementing more agile concepts for the Brainjolt team at large.

 

Scorpion team
photo via Scorpion

Scorpion is a full-service integrated marketing agency that provides brands with growth solutions including SEO, digital advertising, online reputation monitoring and content marketing. Chris Jenkins, Scorpions’ VP of engineering, explained that the company’s team thrives because of their willingness to seek out new knowledge.
 

Why do you think your company has the best developers in town?

Scorpion looks to raise the bar with every new hire we make. We’re always looking to increase our overall knowledge, and are eager to have experts on our teams who invigorate our engineers and challenge all of us to grow. We also try to afford our engineers every opportunity for learning, trying new things and thinking of unique solutions to interesting problems.

We're always looking to increase our overall knowledge, and are eager to have experts on our teams who invigorate our engineers and challenge all of us to grow.” ​​​​​​

What challenges are they addressing? What technology are they using to do so?

Scorpion creates solutions for a broad set of marketing problems and a broad set of users. As a true full-service digital agency, we handle advertising, websites, offline tracking and real-time communication. While we’re primarily a Microsoft shop, we encourage the usage of the right tools for a problem, and we aim to create scalable, flexible solutions that can be used for many different verticals and organizational structures.

 

Core Digital Media team
photo via Core Digital Media

Core Digital Media owns and operates the sites ClassesUSA and LowerMyBills via its marketing platform. The company works with partners across the financial services and education markets, and their developers are given room to experiment with new ideas. Qazi Hasan, Core Digital Media’s senior software engineer, talked to us about how their dev team utilizes a diverse tech stack.

 

Why do you think your company has the best developers in town?

Core Digital Media has a very favorable environment for developers to apply and enhance their coding and system skills. Developers are given the freedom to try out new ideas and technologies to solve problems. We follow Test Driven Development, write tech blogs and engage in stimulating discussions to elevate the standard of our technology stack. Developers here believe in writing elegant code that is vetted through a collaborative code review process which enables everyone to learn and deliver great quality. There are many resources and tools at our disposal to make the process of software development a very satisfying experience.

Developers are given the freedom to try out new ideas and technologies to solve problems.” 

What challenges are they addressing? What technology are they using to do so?

Core Digital has proprietary marketing and A/B testing platforms. This brings a lot of technical and business challenges. We have chosen a diverse stack of technologies for the job depending on the requirement at hand. Java powers our back-end with help of frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. We are building highly scalable distributed micro-services based web applications. We use Node.js and React to create the responsive and visually impressive user experience. We use a variety of data stores such as MongoDB and Oracle to build useful data-driven consumer features. We use state-of-the-art monitoring and debugging solutions.

 

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