Imagine that you were charged with finishing a task started by your colleague. He or she implemented it just before leaving for a vacation. Now it is your job to finish and release it.
Imagine that you were charged with finishing a task started by your colleague. He or she implemented it just before leaving for a vacation. Now it is your job to finish and release it.
The Allegro Tech team consists of more than a thousand skilled and ambitious engineers who work in 5 locations: Poznań, Warsaw, Kraków, Toruń, and Wrocław. It's highly probable that you have already met some of them at meetups or conferences in Poland or abroad. Moreover, there's a chance that you are going to have a chat with them during our recruitment process. Find out what they think about Allegro as a workplace, and what drives them.
I joined Allegro right before the microservice revolution. From this perspective I can see how much has changed and how lucky I am to be part of that process. Currently I’m leading a team responsible for services that are fundamental to our new architecture. My job is to make life of all our developers easier and ensure that the infrastructure is ready to meet their demands. Despite exciting technologies and the huge scale, the most important thing at Allegro are the people I work with, engineers and managers from whom I still have a lot to learn.
Since my first days at Allegro I have had the opportunity to setup and work on many exciting projects. As a System Engineer I was building infrastructural services like a log aggregation system. Later, as a Solutions Architect, I was involved in migrating our platform to Service Oriented Architecture. Now I'm engaged in a Hadoop data governance project and building our BigData stack. It proves that Allegro is a great place where you never get bored because there are always inspiring projects going on.
My adventure at Allegro started in April 2012. Back then I was working on a ground-breaking Open Source project – Ralph. It is a system for managing Data Center infrastructure that helped us automate work of thousands of servers and optimize the maintenance cost. I lead a team that develops software for managing servers, databases and microservices. Every day, we look for solutions that allow us to use the resources of our two Data Centers to their maximum, lower the cost and conveniently automate tasks performed in Data Centers. Our goal is to provide absolute scalability and ensure that Allegro developers can deploy new functionalities for our users in no time. Working with our infrastructure is far from mundane. When integrating various systems you have to deal with many programming languages such as Python, Go, Java and even Swift. Moreover, the scale of Allegro provides exciting challenges, where every 1% makes a difference.
I have worked with Java related technologies since 2004, and I joined Allegro search team about 3 years ago. Developing the largest e-commerce search engine in Poland is both challenging and fun. Working as a full stack search developer can be demanding as it requires a unique blend of software development, devops and Big Data skills. I enjoy the atmosphere of restless technical curiosity which I experience at Allegro. I've never had a chance to work with such passionate developers before! You learn something interesting in terms of software and product development all the time. Moreover, I support Java community in Poznań as one of the leaders of Poznań JUG and as a co-organizer of GeeCON conference. I am a happy father of three, and a lucky man who married a very patient woman.
I joined Allegro as an iOS developer when mobile apps were considered to be only hipster toys. Today, more than a half of Allegro traffic comes from mobile devices. I have the privilege of working with amazing people on one of the largest personal shopping assistant apps in Europe. Working with such a huge scale is incredible, because every little decision can impact millions of users. By getting the things right, we can make people's lives easier.
I love low-level stuff and reverse engineering. I think it is wrong to call these things "useless knowledge". It should be the developer's personal duty to understand how computers work. At Allegro I can make use of this knowledge.
At Allegro, we build and maintain some of the most distributed and scalable applications in Central Europe. This poses many challenges, starting with architecture and design, through the choice of technologies, code quality and performance tuning, and ending with deployment and devops. In this blog, our engineers share their experiences and write about some of the interesting things taking place at the company.
