Console

How engineering works at IPinfo

How are the teams structured?

There are four different engineering teams. The web team focuses on the website and the backend team focuses on the billing system, the API and its underlying implementation. There is also a devops team under the backend team.

The data team manages all the data pipelines and sources - they oversee how we get data and how we store it.

Finally, the integrations team focuses on a lot of our open source stuff. You can find our SDKs, the CLI, and some third party plugins on our website - all done by the integrations team.

What tools do engineers use?

• Infrastructure: Google Kubernetes Engine
• Logging and Monitoring: Google Cloud Monitoring
• Design: Figma
• Planning and coordination: Notion and Linear
• Version Control: Git and GitHub

Can developers pick their own tools?

For something trivial like code editors, developers can pick whatever they like. For other tools, they should confer with the rest of the team. If there's a need for a tool for some particular use case, we will consider it. People are encouraged to go and discover these things, figure it out, then present their reasoning and logic for why that's the best thing to use. We provide freedom, but the decision to use it has to be justified.

How does the development process work? What's the process for working through bugs, features and tech debt?

The product manager decides the general direction. Any tech debt that needs to be worked upon is handled by having one week cool off period within a four work week cycle. In that one week cool down period, we focus on tech debt and any other minor issues that come up.

How does code get reviewed, merged, and deployed?

After tests, someone will review the code to see if it hits the code quality requirements. We don't have super stringent requirements, but we do use a lot of tooling to help us automate those decisions.

We use GitHub pull requests - once the reviewer, whoever it might be, reviews it and approves it, it gets merged into the main branch. We deploy things to production in an automated fashion every day.

What is the QA process?

Currently, there is no formal process. We rely on engineers to test their code while writing it and run the automated tests before every pull request is merged. We have an expectation that if there's anything new being developed, you're going to either write a test or manually test it yourself.

We have some automated unit tests, as well as some end-to-end tests in our review process. There's also a staging environment where we test any changes before it gets to production.

What are some recent examples of interesting development challenges solved by internal teams as part of building the product?

The primary challenge we've faced this year is converting our frontend from rendering via a server-side templating engine in NodeJS, to React, and then later adding NextJS in the middle for optimizations. The biggest challenge was simply that we had a very large frontend app, with a sophisticated dashboard, many marketing pages, and a lot of stakeholders that needed to ensure their needs remained met during the transition.

Another challenge we faced was when we were getting attacked by some DDoS adversaries. They were trying to DDoS our website by spiking the request count to millions of requests per second. We had to work hard to build a strategy that would fend off the attacks. We found some interesting ways to avoid these insane request spikes by just making our system more scalable and react very fast to these changes.

How does on-call work?

Currently, we don't have an on call process because it's a very small team.

Hiring process at IPinfo

How does the application process work? What are the stages and what is the timeline?

The application process is straightforward and should not take more than two weeks for most candidates. The stages of application process are as follows:

• Initial technical screen (30-45 min): Candidate is evaluated on their technical knowledge by a project manager This stage includes an introduction followed by basic technical questions.
• Personality interview: A short call to check if the candidate is a good fit for the role and team.
• Technical project: A short take home test for candidates to demonstrate their technical skills.
• Interview with CEO: A general interview to discuss your role and responsibilities.

What is the career progression framework? How are promotions and performance reviews managed?

The team has been very small for a very long time, and now it's suddenly growing. We don't have a formal performance review process in place, yet. At this stage, people are almost the founding members of the team - everyone is really important. We're assuming everyone can wear a lot of hats and manage themselves.