3 Boston engineers share the mission-critical projects they’re working on

by Justine Hofherr
May 23, 2018
engineers
Photo via Shutterstock

Behind every successful tech company is an uber-talented engineering team. Not only are these superheroes tasked with building one-of-a-kind products, but they must also anticipate the future and iterate on their companies’ offerings. We asked three engineers to share the coolest projects they’re working on.

 

Amit Mahajan
Senior Software Engineer • Toast

Toast is an all-in-one point of sale and restaurant management platform that’s constantly adding advanced functionality so its customers can seamlessly accomplish tasks like labor management and menu modifications. Senior Software Engineer Amit Mahajan shares how his current project impacts Toast’s clients in real time.

 

What's one mission-critical project you're working on?

I am currently working on a pricing code unification project. This is an architectural project affecting the core of the product, related to pricing and taxes. Knowing that the consumer is impacted right away when we find and fix a bug is thrilling! It also keeps us on our toes.

 

What's one project you'd love to initiate for your company?

I would love to see Toast sponsor after-hours workshops to help external software engineers learn technology — Android, microservices, design patterns and so on — and answer questions. It would be a great opportunity for us to engage in the Boston tech community and build a talent network that facilitates knowledge sharing.

 

Heath Marvin
Senior Systems Engineer

SimpliSafe engineers have a very important job: designing wireless home security systems that are user friendly and keep people safe. Heath Marvin, senior systems engineer, shared what he’s working on and areas he’d like to improve in the development space.

 

What's one mission-critical project you're working on?

I am working with a team here in Boston to build a smart door lock that will integrate with the rest of our award-winning security system. The lock is going to be a big addition to our mission of making every home safe. The lock will automatically lock your doors when you arm your security system, and automatically unlock when you get back home. I’m working as the technical lead on the project and am really enjoying all the technical and non-technical challenges of the job.

 

What's one project you'd love to initiate for your company?

I’d love to improve our product development process. SimpliSafe has grown so fast that we are a big team operating like a small company. We now have many different projects going on at once, and it would help with communication and product quality if we could be a little more formal with our development. This is challenging, though. We have a great culture and have been really successful with the way things work now. We don’t want to mess that up by putting too much process in the way of all the good that happens every day in the office.

 

Jason Urton
Lead Software Engineer • Grubhub

LevelUp engineers are working to build a next-generation mobile payment network that offers a seamless experience for both consumers and merchants. One of their lead software engineers, Jason Urton, shares the hottest projects he’s got under his belt — and ones that he’d like to make happen.

 

What's one mission-critical project you're working on?

The rapid growth that we've undergone over the past couple of years has brought with it some growing pains, so we've been working hard to identify and eliminate the bottlenecks in our systems before they become real problems. One recent project has focused on reducing the memory footprint of the enormous amount of restaurant menu data that we store by changing the storage model to a document-based approach. This vastly reduces the space used — and introduces its own set of challenges. Another project has involved enabling intelligent load balancing for web requests, so that large spikes in traffic to non-critical API endpoints in our systems don't result in reduced availability for the more important ones.

 

What's one project you'd love to initiate for your company?

We have a large amount of menu data and are processing tens of thousands of orders, and growing, every day. There are lots of interesting insights to be gleaned from this data, and we could build some neat, intelligent interactions around them. I'd love to work on building systems that are smart enough to learn from customer usage data to predict what sort of things they will want and when, and then offer those customers the appropriate action. We could also offer feedback to restaurants on how various menu configurations and price points work in a way that's never been possible before, enabling these businesses to make better data-driven decisions through analytics, A/B testing and so on.

 

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