Console

How engineering works at Vantage

How are the teams structured?

We have a fairly flat organization given the size of the team. All engineering, product and design report into Brooke McKim, Co-Founder and CTO. Sales, marketing and customer success functions report into Ben Schaechter, Co-Founder and CEO.

What tools do engineers use?

Tools we use at Vantage include Docker, Ruby, Rails, Slack, Notion, Git, Github, Github Issues, Github Actions, Sentry, ngrok, Datadog.

Can developers pick their own tools?

Yes, for the most part! We try to maintain some consistency across the organization but look to developers to make recommendations.

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

We have a well-defined product spec review process which engineers participate in. From that product spec being finalized, development efforts begin and we have weekly product check-ins until a feature is launched. As for bugs, they’re typically opened and tracked via Github issues and remediated by the engineer working on that specific part of the code. Given the nascent stage of the company, we don’t have a tremendous amount of tech debt and most effort is spent on feature development.

How does code get reviewed, merged, and deployed?

We have a standard process around pull requests where any major change should be opened via pull request and reviewed by at least one other team-member before deploying to either staging or production depending on the impact of the change going out. Ideally, there would be a set of accompanying tests that pass as part of major logic changes.

What is the QA process?

At a minimum we have an internal team QA process and for most features we can dogfood them ourselves internally before exposing them to customers. For certain features, we do run an “early access” period where we can get feedback as well. It is a fairly light, casual process for now that will become more thorough over time.

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

We have some fairly significant scale when it comes to data and we recently transitioned over our entire data processing pipeline to leverage a data warehouse as our database was under considerable pressure. We are now seamlessly processing terabytes of data representing hundreds of millions of annualized dollars for our customers.