Before Co-founder and CTO Ram Kumar Rengaswamy launched adtech platform Beeswax, he was living every engineer’s dream: working at Google and building systems used all over the world. But after seven years with the company, he felt he had learned everything he could about the open source community.
“No matter how impactful my contributions were at Google, I couldn’t help but feel like a small cog in a very big wheel,” he added.
That’s when Rengaswamy decided to channel his passion and experience into a new project. In 2014, he, along with other former Google employees Ari Paparo and Shamim Samadi, launched Beeswax, a platform that gives marketers the ability to quickly reach a large target audience and review detailed results of their campaigns.
No matter how impactful my contributions were at Google, I couldn’t help but feel like a small cog in a very big wheel."
Google isn’t the only big name in the company’s foundation. Other members of the team list Facebook and AppNexus as their former employers. While working at a major corporation isn’t a requirement for a job at Beeswax, being able to transfer knowledge — including skills learned at previous employers — is a non-negotiable.
“When we hire experienced candidates, we evaluate their ability to be a good mentor to others on the team who might be starting their career,” said Rengaswamy. “We want Beeswax to a be place where everyone has an opportunity to learn and improve.”
The platform’s programmatic bidders are written in C++, as its bidding systems receive close to 2 million requests per second and have a tail latency requirement of 20ms, which allows the team build a very high-performance, asynchronous serving system. The rest of the system is written almost entirely in Python so they can quickly move from a prototype to a production-ready system.
With a platform this sophisticated, engineers must be able to communicate with one another so nothing gets lost in translation.
When we hire experienced candidates, we evaluate their ability to be a good mentor to others on the team."
“While evaluating the coding ability of an engineer, one of the aspects we pay very close attention to is code readability,” said Rengaswamy. “Having a very well-documented and readable code base is extremely important to us and we have processes in place such as code reviews to ensure that.”
As Beeswax grows, so will its engineering team — and currently, the bar is set high.
“The accomplishment I am most proud of at Beeswax is the team that we have assembled,” said Rengaswamy. “They are an extremely smart, motivated and focused group of individuals. Everyone goes above and beyond to help others, be it mentorship, dealing with production emergencies during non-business hours or to meet tight feature deadlines. It’s really rare to see this level of cooperation and it feels really special.”
