Engineering teams that use cutting-edge technologies

We’re leveraging the latest technology to deliver the most effective learning and coaching platform possible.

At Upduo, we help companies deliver engaging one-on-one coaching sessions at scale that drive measurable business outcomes. While other learning and training platforms tend to use older legacy frameworks, we take advantage of the latest technologies to create a tool that is fun for end users and effective for companies. We use Django on the backend and React, React Native, and TypeScript for our frontend.

By staying on the cutting edge of these frameworks’ releases, we’re able to remain nimble and beat out legacy incumbents. In the near future, we’ll also have additional microservices that use even newer frameworks. That said, if you haven’t worked with a certain tech stack before, it’s not a problem at all. In fact, all of our current engineers used completely different tech stacks before joining us! We look for folks who are eager to learn.

The pandemic only underscored the increasing need for better virtual learning options and there’s clear product-market fit. As we continue to migrate our infrastructure to new technologies and delve into AI (to help recommend curriculums to customers for example), new hires will have lots of exciting problems to work on.

We maintain a complex, interdependent chain of technology.

We don’t just aim to build a great marketplace for customers and shoppers. We are also trusted by many of the top retailers in North America to power their ecommerce businesses, something that’s so important to this industry as transactions move online. With our marketplace as well as enterprise offerings, we build the technological forefront of our retailers.

We’ve doubled down on machine learning and data science in order to maintain a massive data catalog (the largest grocery catalog ever), mitigate lost demand in our fulfillment chain, and build the technological backend of our retail partners’ white-label sites (if you made an online purchase from Costco.com, it was powered by Instacart). Check out this deep dive on the algorithms we use to power Instacart.

Our backend systems support tight integrations with some of the largest retailers in North America and our engineers are working to scale operations across our iOS, Android, and web applications. We currently use Rails, Ruby, Python, R, PostgreSQL 9.6, React 0.17, AWS, Docker, RabbitMQ, Sidekiq, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Twilio, Mapbox, and SiftScience, but don’t require folks to have experience with our stack. There is no shortage of interesting models to improve, algorithms to optimize, and problems to solve as we reach scale. If you have a solid sense for basic languages and are eager to learn new ones, please reach out!

We’re not just using the best-in-class technologies, we’re actively innovating and building on them.

Our infrastructure is orchestrated using Kubernetes, and is crucial to everything we do. We also use Cadence, Presto, and Flink for core functions of our system. You can listen/read about all of the details on our tech on our Software Engineering Daily podcast interview!

Ultimately, our goal is to create capabilities based on these tools that solve our customers’ problems in unique and specialized ways. Using cutting-edge technologies allows us to do so in a stress-free way; we can have predictable releases and build a lot of trust with our processes when we’re not getting slowed down by tech that’s constantly breaking or doesn’t work.

Staying on top of cutting-edge tech is a given.

Standards and trends move especially fast in Web3, which forces us to constantly learn and adapt. There may be exciting new blockchain improvements coming up that we need to know about and support on day one. For instance, we added support for the ERC-721A NFT standard in a few days as we saw interest growing for it.

Our tech stack is written entirely in Typescript and uses React and Next.js frameworks. As a small team, we’re unafraid to pilot new technologies if it gets the job done well. For example, we’re already exploring where GPT-4 can significantly improve the developer onboarding or customer support experience. We practice a thoughtful “buy-not-build” culture to focus our team and not reinvent the wheel or spread our efforts too thin.

If you’re excited about being a leader in an area that will disrupt entire generations to come, get in touch!