SmartBear's tools are built to streamline your DevOps processes while seamlessly working with the products you use – and will use
We connected with Naveen, Director of Engineering, at SmartBear to get an inside look at the company's technology, various projects, the team's culture, and more.
Quick Hit Details
- Year Founded: 2009
- Number of employees: 748
- Number of engineers: 207
- Industry: Software
Can you share a summary about SmartBear?
SmartBear provides a portfolio of trusted tools that give software development teams around the world visibility into end-to-end quality through test management and automation, API development lifecycle, and application stability, ensuring each software release is better than the last. Our award-winning tools include SwaggerHub, TestComplete, BugSnag, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, and PactFlow, among others. SmartBear is trusted by over 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers at 32,000+ organizations – including innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft. With an active peer-to-peer community, we meet customers where they are to help make our technology-driven world a better place. SmartBear is committed to ethical corporate practices and social responsibility, promoting good in all the communities we serve.
What are some of the different technologies that the engineering team gets to work with and at what scale?
Given the enterprise products that we develop and build, we have exposure to a broad spectrum of technologies. At a high level, our tech stack includes a mix of native HTML, JavaScript, AngularJS, and ReactJS for the front-end and Java, Elasticsearch, Redis, relational database management system (RDBMS), NoSQL Key-value Database, and a time series database (TSDB) for the back-end. All our products are deployed on AWS, and we use AWS Fargate containers for all our production load.
What are some of the interesting projects that the engineering team is tackling?
There are two major challenges that our teams are currently solving. One of these challenges is high data volume. With the rate at which data is being created and consumed exponentially, there is so much automation. Currently, our teams are focused on how to handle these high volumes of data hitting our systems and processing them in a timely fashion. The other challenge our teams are also working on is scalability, making our products and platforms to scale, horizontally and vertically, which will enable them to handle the increased traffic flowing into our systems.
Does your engineering team have a chance to work on projects outside of their day-to-day responsibilities?
Engineering teams at SmartBear thrive on innovation, and thus we have a formal Hackathon platform, conducted internally, that is provided to teams so they can collaborate across teams and geographies innovating and working on their pet projects. For the engineering teams in India, we also encourage the culture of contributing to open source projects as the culture of open source is deeply ingrained into the way SmartBear is structured.
What is the culture like at SmartBear for the engineering team?
Within our engineering team, we foster a generative culture. We are feedback-driven, and innovation forms the cornerstone on which our teams are built. We believe in teamwork, and we enjoy working in a collaborative environment. We have a flat hierarchy within our engineering team, so everyone is always available to help.
What can a potential employee expect during the interview process?
Interviews are straight forward. We don’t expect candidates to know everything outside the areas in which they have worked. Given that we have a broad spectrum in terms of our tech stack, we believe in hiring SMEs in a particular field where the interviews have a deep focus on technology. Non-technical factors like commitment, ownership, and ability to learn and adapt are also covered. The interview is also an opportunity for the candidate to meet with the team and get to know them a bit and ask any questions they might have about the role, team, or SmartBear.
Are you involved in any local tech organizations or Meetups?
We are involved in the Atlassian Community Bangalore Chapter as it closely relates to the products and the domain that we develop for. This provides us with a great opportunity to meet fellow developers and learn and share as a community.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Star Wars or Star Trek?
Star Trek – I would say this best embodies our engineering team’s spirit given we believe in teamwork and endeavor to explore and uncover the unexplored frontiers of technology.
iPhone or Android?
I don’t think there is a clear winner here. I would say the camp is pretty much divided between both.
Coffee - hot or iced?
Hot, of course – the only way you can truly enjoy a cup of coffee.
Favorite employee perk?
Summer Fridays – For the entire summer, teams company-wide wind up early every Friday and spend the time unwinding with family and friends. This helps us recharge and keeps the team motivated. This is something everyone at SmartBear looks forward to.
What TV show describes the engineering team’s culture?
I would say Star Trek again as it depicts the team culture of bonding together and delivering as one team.
Team Profiles
Syed Nurulla, Lead Software Engineer
Syed Nurulla is Lead Software Engineer at SmartBear. He has more than a decade of engineering experience.
Neelakanta Reddy M, Lead Software Engineer
Neelakanta Reddy M is Lead Software Engineer at SmartBear. He has more than a decade of engineering experience. Previously, he was Senior Software Developer at Conformiq, Inc.
