TripAdvisor's Scalable Web Engineering Program

TripAdvisor is offering a unique, full time employment opportunity, for select software engineers who want to learn from and contribute to a successful and scalable consumer web business across all areas of technology, operations, and business. By joining TripAdvisor as an engineer and participating in this program, you will have the opportunity to work in all areas needed to develop and operate a successful consumer web business at scale.

Qualified candidates (all levels of experience are welcome, please see the requirements section) can apply to Engineering Jobs. Please include "webprogram: <my name>" as the subject, attach a resume, and why you are interested in this program, and what areas you would like to see included in your program.

What is this program?

• TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel site with over 40M unique visitors each month, is offering a unique program for select engineers who want to experience, hands on, all aspects of building and running a consumer web business at scale
• TripAdvisor's success is based on a long history of learning and adapting to the challenges of scaling a consumer web business: hyper-fast product development, distributed computing, distributed software engineering, SEO, SEM, Mobile, International, Social Networking, Big Data, and a highly scalable operational environment with four 9's of uptime and no scheduled downtime. This program is an opportunity to learn from and contribute in all of these areas
• A customized engineering program based on your interests will immerse you hands on, allowing you to learn about and deliver business impacting engineering work in all of the critical areas needed to run a scalable consumer web business

How does this work?

• A custom designed rotation program based on your interests allows you to experience, hands on, different areas of the business
• You will work, as a full member of different engineering teams, for between one and three months on each team, delivering code with immediate impact on the business
• You will receive training and a "buddy" in each area
• You will learn about the business area and write a lot of code that will directly impact that area
• You will have the opportunity to attend talks and discussions given by the senior executives at TripAdvisor representing Engineering, Product, Sales, and Marketing

Who this program is for:

• You want to learn how to build and operate consumer web technology at scale: technology, features, traffic, analysis, revenue, A/B testing, search engine marketing and optimization
• You have a broad range of interests and skills
• You are smart, work fast, learn quickly, and are adaptable to changing business and technology situations
• You do not want a job, you want a learning experience

Why is TripAdvisor able to offer this?

• We are an organization that allows and encourages engineers to move between teams and try new things
• We are successful across a broad range of consumer web technologies, businesses, and operations
• We have a unique environment that consists of many small teams, each team having significant autonomy
• Our engineers "do it all" - tight "1-1" integration with small business/marketing teams, each engineer does their own software design, coding, and testing
• Our engineers work on all levels of the stack - HTML, CSS, JS, Java, Database, scripting, automation, metrics, analytics
• We deliver code daily and weekly in an operational environment of over 2B distributed operations, serving 150M requests to over 4M users each day
• We move quickly - projects are broken down into small (1 day to 10 day) iterations with weekly site deployments, and daily patch options for those "important, must get out now" code releases
• Instant results - near real-time metrics and monitoring

Requirements:

• BS in Computer Science, or equivalent knowledge - whiteboard design, algorithm, and coding sessions are an integral part of our interview process
• A track record of delivering commercial, web based, products preferably in a scalable environment
• An ability to work well with people in both technical and business situations
• A track record of being involved in startups and/or internships at commercial software companies
• Smarts, good judgement, flexibility, speed, and an ability to get things done
• Passion for technology - what open source projects have you contributed to, what kind of work do you do on the side?

The Tech:

• Linux/Mac based development, 30" monitors, a cloud of virtual servers, weekly deployments, continuous builds with integrated testing
• Live site runs on Linux, Apache, Tomcat, Java, Postgres, Lucene, Memcached
• Off-line systems run on all the above, plus Ruby, PHP, Python, bash, etc
• Big Data: Hadoop, Hive, SQL based cubes
• Two full datacenters serving 2B distributed operations and 150M page requests per day, with four 9's of uptime

The Perks:

• Catered lunched 3X per week and free drinks, coffee, snacks, candy, fruit
• Weekly technology brown bags by the engineers with a monthly open Q&A session hosted by the VPE
• Summer Friday's - employees can choose to time-shift their work to free up Fridays during summer months
• Hacker's Week - every engineer gets one week per year to work on a technology project of their choice
• Game room and not just one, but two kegs
• Annual company holiday event and a company summer outing - golf, frisbee, volleyball, BBQ
• Each summer all employees take a day off to contribute our time to a local charity
• TripAdvisor has created and funded a charitable foundation that provides support to select non-profit organizations that have active involvement by TripAdvisor employees

Example Program Areas:

• Develop consumer-facing features used by over 45 million unique people each month
• Work on a commerce team that supports over $500M of annual revenue
• Learn how to drive business through SEO and SEM
• Mine over 30TBs of data using Hadoop, Hive, cubes, and more
• Plumb the depths of the Facebook OpenGraph
• Maintain and enhance a distributed computing environment that serves over 150M page views a day
• Work on top-rated, hugely popular mobile apps across six platforms
• Work in and learn how to operate multiple data centers
• and much, much more