Why we joined AdRoll Engineering

Written by , October 18, 2013

AdRoll is going gangbuster when it comes to hiring engineers. We’re adding headcount in a very competitive market on an ongoing basis, and we continue to differentiate ourselves with the depth and complexity of our engineering problems. We take a very collaborative approach to engineering but give individuals a high degree of project ownership. While we bounce ideas off one another and learn together, each engineer is tackling large problems directly tied to the company’s bottom line.

Below you’ll meet a few of our college hires and learn why they chose to join AdRoll Engineering. Wesley Chow joins our data engineering team as a recent graduate of UC Berkeley EECS. Marianne “Mars” Jullian joins us from Princeton and is currently working on the front-end team.

Intro written by Jesse Lauro, an engineer with AdRoll’s Real-time Bidding team.

Wesley Chow

The CS job market for new graduates is very hot right now. While I don’t have any numbers to back this up, I would guess that many companies have trouble finding enough candidates to fill their open positions. Knowing this, many college seniors are picky (some would say spoiled) in choosing where they will work after graduation. Keeping this in mind, I wanted to share why I chose specifically to work at AdRoll over my other offers.

I had two major criteria during my job hunt. The first was that I really wanted a chance to grow into a large role within the company. My hope was that this would involve building core projects right from the start. Ideally I would have the opportunity to work on projects that would have a measurable effect on the success of the company. Clearly this is much easier to accomplish at a startup than at a more established company. With only twelve engineers at the time I interviewed (AdRoll engineering has since grown to about twenty), I felt that AdRoll fit the bill perfectly. Also, it definitely helped that AdRoll had a successful and well defined business model, contributing towards an overall sense of job security.

My second criterion was to continue to pursue my specific interests within the field. During my last year at school, I had developed an interest in working with distributed systems. At the risk of being cliche, I wanted to work with “Big Data”. With around 500TB of data stored in Amazon S3 and approximately 10TB of data being handled per day, AdRoll certainly qualified.

Two months in, I’ve already had the chance to touch the typical tools for storing and handling large amounts of data (Hadoop, HBase, S3, and DynamoDB), in addition to getting to play with some more cutting edge realtime processing tools such as Storm and Kafka. My next project promises to be a system I will get to build from the ground up that involves AdRoll’s push to go global. How’s that for an exciting challenge to a new engineer? I’m ecstatic. AdRoll has already proven to be the right choice, with a lot of long term potential.

Mars Jullian

When I first started looking for jobs in October of last year I was a little nervous about how the process would go, but by the end of it I had received four comparable offers all located in the Bay Area. Everyone’s work and mission interested me; so why did I choose AdRoll over the other three companies? Between the four offers, it eventually came down to the culture of each company and opportunities for learning.

From a previous summer internship experience with a startup I already knew I wanted to work in a small company. In smaller startups, a fewer number of people aspire to tackle the same magnitude of problems that larger companies face. I found that there were more opportunities to learn and a greater chance of being able to make an impact. On the other hand, I was also interested in joining a larger company with some social support as I was facing a move to not only a new city, but also a completely different coast.

AdRoll was able to offer me both: a small team where I would have an opportunity to learn and grow as a developer, being only one of a handful of engineers working on big problems, and also the support of a larger company. AdRoll has about 250 employees spread across three offices in SF, NY, and Dublin with an engineering team of only about twenty people and the team I work on, the front-end engineering team, is even smaller than that: only four people (including me). It was the startup feel I was looking for in the context of a larger and social company.

Now that I am here at AdRoll, and six weeks in, I am so glad I made the decision that I did. Not only am I glad to be working on a small team that is part of a larger company, but the people are great and no one ever could have explained how interesting the problems the engineering team is working on are until I arrived. It’s going to be quite an adventure working here…