Move over, Silicon Valley. For engineers looking to take their careers to the next level, Los Angeles is the place to be.
Don’t believe us? Look at the data. Behind San Francisco’s Bay Area and New York, LA recently emerged as the nation’s third-largest startup market, with nearly 4,000 venture-backed startups setting up shop in the City of Angels. That’s according to San Francisco-based Telstra Ventures, whose annual “Tech’s Great Migration” report highlights present and future tech hubs around the U.S.
Of course, business is booming for engineers everywhere. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in engineering is projected to grow 6 percent from 2020 to 2030; by that count, around 146,000 new jobs will be added in the field by decade’s end. In other words, whether you’re entering the field for the first time or a senior-level individual looking for new opportunities, it’s a great time to be an engineer.
With that said, those in the field eyeing LA would be particularly well-advised to check out all five of the following tech companies, which are based around the city and currently hiring at a rapid pace. From healthcare marketplace GoodRX to software development company Laserfiche, all of these top employers are looking to fill in-demand engineering roles — and representatives from each have something to say about why their tech stacks and top-tier teams stand out from the pack.
What they do: GoodRx is a fast-growing healthcare marketplace that operates a telemedicine platform and a free-to-use website and mobile app. These services track prescription drug prices in the United States and provide free drug coupons for discounts on medications.
GoodRx’s tech stack: “Our library is built using a variety of diverse tools to document and display our work, with a myriad of frameworks and tools that allow for testing,” Harris said. “One of my favorite tools we use within the company helps us with visual regression testing. Imagine building a component with 100 variants, then needing to make a simple style change. Our tools will do the heavy lifting of making sure that style change impacts the component in the way you expect — and only the way you expect — via automated screenshots. Pretty great, right?”
Keeping engineers on their toes: “My team is consistently trying to figure out ways to create individual assets in a systematic way. Within GoodRx, my team is faced with making these assets performant and accessible, then providing enough documentation so that engineers and designers within the company will understand how to use them.
One challenging project I have been working on recently is auditing our current accessibility threshold within these assets. Some audit criteria for a button asset we might consider, for example, include color contrast, proper HTML markup and keyboard navigation ability. Auditing anything with an extensive amount of variants and behaviors can make for a challenging, yet rewarding, project.”
Building with blocks: “I always enjoy talking about my team, as I feel it’s super unique. My team is pretty evenly split between designers and engineers, to ensure we are meeting the needs of both our internal designers and engineers. I always love describing what a design system is in the bigger scheme of front-end engineering. Imagine playing with Lego. Our team creates the basic pieces: colors, sizes, the basics around how they fit together. The consumers, both front-end engineers and designers, are then the creators, utilizing our Lego pieces to create masterpieces.”
What they do: Centerfield Media develops intelligent, data-driven marketing and sales technology utilizing real-time biddable media, automated call routing and customized scripting. Their proprietary platform, Dugout, combined with a 1,500-person sales and retention center, delivers new customers to brands worldwide.
Centerfield’s tech stack: “We build our front-end applications using React Redux and our middle tier microservice APIs and business logic using C# .NET,” Bonifassi said. “We store our data using multiple types of datastores, such as MySQL, MongoDB and Redis. We facilitate communication between our microservices using event-driven message buses, including exchanges, topics and queues, such as Amazon’s Simple Notification Service and Simple Queue Service. We also use AWS Lambda functions, triggered by Cloudwatch or S3 actions.
My favorite technology tools the team uses are integrations with identity platforms such as Okta; Datadog for observability and overall health monitoring of our applications; and password and credential management platforms such as AWS Secrets Manager. Having the ability to easily rotate, manage and retrieve database credentials, API keys and other credentials in our various applications allows us to always ensure we put security at the forefront of what we build.”
Understanding the why: “We are building a tool that gives the user the opportunity to create, manage and render clusters of content and to associate these clusters to business-specific rules. This will ultimately make us able to render content and bring a more relevant user experience to users interacting with our digital properties. What we enjoy most about this project is having the opportunity to understand the “why” behind it. As an engineering team, when we are part of initiatives to understand the project's direct impact on the company's growth and financial goals, it puts our work into great focus and perspective.”
People, technology and culture: “Getting to work with our people every day is a privilege. The variety of experience and expertise makes learning by osmosis natural and inevitable. I get to learn something new every day, be it about life, technology, current events, culture or finances.
The technology we build is fun. The commitment we have to resources and opportunities to learn in this ever-evolving world is rare. And to speak to the culture: I have never met a more relentless team focused on creating experiences and events that are centered around getting each and every one of us away from our keyboards, so that we can interact with each other away from the work.”
What they do: Prodege is a marketing and consumer insights platform that helps brands, marketers and agencies uncover the answers to their business questions, acquire new customers, increase revenue and drive brand loyalty and product adoption.
Prodege’s tech stack: “At Prodege, our engineering team is responsible for developing and maintaining a portfolio of seven different consumer-facing brands and an enterprise B2B platform connecting marketers to those consumers,” Curtis said. “That adds up to over 10 websites and mobile apps, plus a half-dozen browser extensions. In other words, there’s a lot of tech to stack.
On the development side, our back end is primarily Java and MySQL. On the front end, we’re currently replacing a mix of jQuery, JSP and Handlebars with React and Material UI. On the operations side, we are hosted in the AWS cloud, and we make extensive use of the technologies they offer. I spent a lot of years doing front-end development, so if I’m picking favorites, an obvious choice would be React for its flexibility and reusability.
Too obvious? Okay, show of hands: how many front-end devs out there have received a bug report from an end user that lacks sufficient detail to reproduce it? Everyone? That’s what I thought. Check out TrackJS. It’s a logging tool for client-side errors that provides some of the helpful context that bug reports from end users often lack.”
Wins all around: “One project that we recently kicked off is equal parts challenging and exciting. We’re taking the plunge and migrating our back-end application code from a monolith to a microservice-oriented architecture. I’m always on the lookout for a good refactoring project but, when you’re working with mature tech like our existing application, it’s rare to get a chance to tackle a refactor of this magnitude.
We’ll no doubt keep intact the components that are humming along smoothly, but we’ll also have the luxury of hindsight to revisit any decisions we wish we had made differently over the years. I expect a gratifying amount of house cleaning to accompany our efforts as well. Above all, I’m excited about the opportunity this presents to our entire team — especially for some of the younger engineers who may not have had prior experience building an application from the ground up. Each person will play a foundational role in the design, creation and delivery of the next generation of our software; when engineers are involved at that level, it tends to foster a deeper sense of pride and ownership. In my book, that’s a win all around.”
Part of a team: “I came to Prodege by way of an acquisition in 2016. Sometime during that first year post-acquisition, there was a team outing at a venue near our headquarters in El Segundo. I flew down from the Bay Area to join the festivities. One thing that struck me then and that still holds true today is just how present and engaged this team is. Looking around the room, I couldn’t spot a single person hanging out in the corner texting their non-work peeps. No one was leaving early. That unique spirit of engagement permeates our daily work life and social interactions alike.”
What they do: Celonis’ execution management system is designed to help organizations fix the inefficiencies negatively impacting their performance — while also enabling them to reduce their carbon footprints.
Celonis’ tech stack: “Our browser apps are built on Angular and TypeScript,” Oppenheim said. “We have an exciting front-end infrastructure project underway to unify our apps into a single server, which will simplify development efforts and improve the user experience. We’re doing this using webpack and will use Module Federation to reduce redundant code downloads. Our API servers run on Java and Spring.
Process data is handled by our proprietary database query engine designed specifically for the needs of process mining and analytics. Metadata and UI constructs are stored in a PostgreSQL database. We use a variety of other tools like GitHub, Maven and Yarn, but I’ve been most impressed by Datadog. It’s great to have a unified place where production tasks can be completed, and monitoring, alerting, postmortems, production notes and logging can come together.”
Striking the balance: “Our team is currently working on a project to present a greatly simplified user experience for some Celonis use cases. This project will make our product valuable to a wider range of users. It’s been a fun effort, as we’ve gotten to partner with teams based in Munich and Kosovo to design and build the components needed for this new flow.
One challenge for us has been designing a product that can be understood by, and is useful for, users who have less experience with data analysis while still being flexible enough to meet different companies’ needs. This is a classic front-end product challenge, balancing competing needs of a simple user experience with enough options to make it relevant to a wider audience. From a technical perspective, we also have to make something that works with diverse sets of data, as each company has its own key subtleties. We want to make the product work with as minimal configuration for the user as possible, which creates extra technical complexity for our team.”
Startup in a startup: “We’re building an engineering hub in Los Angeles from scratch, so it has been really awesome to be part of not only the recruitment process but also shaping the local office culture. I’ve only worked in larger organizations in the past, so getting to be part of a tighter group has been a treat. We try to keep it light and are embracing our ‘startup in a startup’ status. We eat lunch together most days, enjoying the lovely Southern California outdoor space at our building. Each afternoon, we also take a few minutes to play a single round of Match 5 Trivia, rotating turns as the host. It’s a fun way to ensure everyone takes a five-minute break and connects with others.”
What they do: Laserfiche’s intelligent content management and business procession automation software solutions — which span enterprise content, records and document management — are trusted by more than 35,000 organizations around the world.
Laserfiche’s tech stack: “Our suite consists of several related products, many of them web applications with a C# .NET backend and AngularJS or TypeScript Angular on the front end,” Johnson said. “Since we offer our products as on-premises installations and in a cloud environment, we work daily with several Amazon Web Services technologies like EC2, ECR, RDS, Lambda, S3, SQS and more, which all come together to form a complex infrastructure supporting our suite. We’ve also recently been moving to Kubernetes-hosted containers.”
Different challenges: “Currently, we’re working on an initiative to port many of our services and microservices to Kubernetes containers. These services vary widely in function and architecture, so each migration poses different challenges. Some services were already running in Docker containers, but others were originally written for Windows machines and had to be rewritten to work in containers across platforms. Most recently, my team has been working on services that host APIs — both internal and external, authenticated and unauthenticated. It’s been interesting figuring out how to wire up the network communication within and outside of the Amazon-hosted, Kubernetes-based environment we’re calling New Cloud.”
Mob rule: “My team does a lot of ‘mob programming,’ which is programming collaboratively in a group of two to four. Sometimes, we’re working together in person on giant TV screens, and sometimes we mob remotely; it works well either way. Mob programming keeps me engaged and, especially when working from home, the social aspect of it is helpful for my sanity. My teammates and I get along great; by working together closely, we’re able to combine our skills and knowledge to get tasks done efficiently. It’s almost counterintuitive, but because we each have different things to offer, we get as much done together as we would if we were all working alone, building expertise all the while.”
