Trying to predict what’s next in tech can feel like shaking a Magic 8 Ball only to see “Ask again later” or “Reply hazy, try again” — but leaders at three established NYC tech companies have a clear vision for 2023.
According to Senior Vice President of Project Management Steven Read, adMarketplace is primed to make exciting leaps ahead with integrated search technology this year, built on a strong foundation of innovative tech by a curious and collaborative team.
“We’re working to deliver relevant product-level results to consumers,” Read told Built In NYC. “This means that if someone searches for ‘boots’ using a shopping app in Texas this afternoon, they may be recommended different products than a consumer searching in New York later in the week.”
Professionals at Yext are also focused on continuing to refine and expand integrated technology for their clients. For Software Engineering Team Lead Stone Mathers, exciting opportunities abound in Yext’s core publisher integration tools as well as the newly launched Listings Verifier. And the team has their sights set on building brand-new projects, too, including streamlining how Yext onboards new clients.
Meanwhile at Newsela, Senior Director of Engineering Dee Wilcox shares Mathers’ enthusiasm for solving problems that don’t yet have clear solutions. “We strive to tackle large, complex projects that don’t have known answers, so bringing creative problem solving and a solution-oriented mindset to the table are crucial,” she said.
This growth mindset reflects Newsela’s broader goal of supporting K-12 teachers and students throughout the teaching and learning process. According to Wilcox, “We harness that passion in what we do to bring joy and a love of learning to the classroom for our users.”
Built In NYC heard more about the projects ahead at Newsela, adMarketplace and Yext, as well as the opportunities that will have job seekers saying “Outlook good.”
What are the biggest projects and priorities your tech team has in 2023?
We’re focused on making sure we’re providing features that delight, support and empower K-12 teachers. We want to be the resource they go to most often, whether they’re teaching third grade Social Studies or ninth grade ELA. Everything our tech team does is to support teachers in restoring the joy of learning in students. To that end, we’re rebuilding some of our solutions on the backend — we’re breaking apart the monolith that served us really well in our early startup years and creating new solutions that meet more needs in the classroom. For example, we’re creating an event system for teachers so they get real-time insights into what’s going on in their students’ learning. We’re also breaking out the activities on our platform so they can be more flexible, standalone features. Our team is also hyper-focused on ease of use this year. We want the learning content on our platform to be even easier to discover so teachers find exactly what they need, when they need it.
Continuous, empathetic learning and coaching is foundational to our engineering culture.”
Describe the career growth opportunities associated with these projects that await new hires.
At Newsela, we have opportunities to join as an associate or mid-level engineer and be mentored by our top-notch principal engineers. We also have a mentoring program for engineering managers and are committed to promoting from within our team. In terms of the type of work you’ll have exposure to, there’s a huge opportunity to work with data and users at scale, on projects like the cutting-edge event systems we’re working to build. Continuous, empathetic learning and coaching is foundational to our engineering culture.
We have six cross-functional engineering guilds for folks to join, explore, and learn from: Data Guild, front end Web Guild, back end Systems Guild, Infrastructure Guild, Testing Guild and our Accessibility Guild. These guilds are an opportunity for engineers to come together, talk about ideas or challenges they’re facing and explore domain-specific or general tech trends. They’ve become a central component of our engineering community and a great way to learn from engineers you may not necessarily work as closely with on a daily basis. Whether it’s the partnerships you build with colleagues or the code you write for our platform, you can make an impact here.
What qualities and skill sets do you look for in a new tech hire?
Open-mindedness and humility in exploring others’ ideas, combined with initiative and resourcefulness, are all pillars of how our team operates. We want our team to feel they can bring their whole self to work each day, and empathy drives not only the way we work together but the work we do for our end users: teachers and students.
Our products serve K-12 classrooms. Many of us have distinct memories of challenges we or our classmates faced in school, and we’re driven to make those realities better for today’s students.
In terms of specific technical skills, Python, TypeScript, AWS, Cloud infrastructure and working with data are all important for our engineering roles.
What are the biggest projects your tech team has in 2023?
Over the last few years, adMarketplace has established deep integrations with major brands to power search functionality within apps, browsers and websites to deliver relevant results to consumers when they are in a moment of shopping intent.
We do this by loading, transforming and analyzing product catalogs from brands, using all available signals to determine which products might be relevant to consumers, allowing consumers to easily find what they’re looking for, as fast as possible.
Today, we’re focused on delivering relevant search results from datasets including hundreds of millions of items, upon a keystroke — in a handful of milliseconds. If you’re interested in solving complex prediction challenges involving large datasets, with latency that’s barely noticeable, then you might be interested in talking with us.
Describe the career growth opportunities associated with these projects that await new hires.
Our business has been around for a while, over 20 years in fact, so we don’t fit the typical startup mold. That means we’ve learned a few things along the way. The founders have bootstrapped the business through grit and determination while also serving and protecting consumers. That foundation has enabled us to really hit our stride over the last couple of years, and we’ve achieved some phenomenal growth.
Our growth rate and profitability has meant that we’re able to invest more into our engineering and to think longer term about our resources, talent requirements and engineering solutions. As a fast-growing business, we’re investing in attracting and developing great engineering talent, and the sky really is the limit for individuals’ careers.
We also invest heavily in our people and are very proud of the engineering talent we’ve developed. One of our senior engineering leaders has been with us for more than 14 years and began his adMarketplace journey as a junior developer straight out of school before reaching a C-level executive role at the company.
When great product owners collaborate closely with great engineers, even better things can be created.”
What qualities and skill sets do you look for in a new tech hire?
We’re looking for curiosity and commitment and team members who have a desire to learn and to bring our business to the next level. We believe that when great product owners collaborate closely with great engineers, we can create even better things.
We are a place that thrives on a culture of innovation. We’re sometimes scrappy, and we take measured risks to overcome challenges. We accept that it means we might fail because learning is never losing.
This culture and approach requires close collaboration. We encourage our teams to collaborate in person and believe that there’s no better way to work through a complex problem than by brainstorming around a blank canvas and having a solid debate amongst people who are passionate about what they’re doing.
What are the biggest projects and priorities your tech team has in 2023?
Our team has three major goals over the next year. First, we are looking to continue improving the newly-released Listings Verifier, which informs users of the state of their public listings compared to the data they provided. Improvements will include changes behind the scenes, such as improved verification models, but also a slew of new features that allow our clients to investigate and address inconsistencies in increasingly useful ways.
Second, we plan to revamp one of our system’s oldest and most essential processes, publisher integration management. The increased automation and consolidation of these core tasks will save both engineers and the Yext Technical Partner Management team countless hours and headaches while keeping our ever-growing publisher network healthy for years to come.
Lastly, we have our sights set on a greenfield project around a critical step in launching new clients — determining which of their provided locations map to the listings that already exist out in the world. Automating this process will significantly reduce both time-to-launch and the resources expended manually.
Describe the career growth opportunities associated with these projects that await new hires.
We have an exciting year ahead full of opportunities for anyone hoping to launch and maintain web software systems at a significant scale. This year’s roadmap will touch on all the skills needed to become a strong full-stack developer, from building APIs and React pages to utilizing DS models to solve difficult open-ended matching problems. Beyond the technical skills, these projects also give plenty of room to push one’s creativity and scope of impact. Whether designing new systems from scratch or investigating novel solutions to those open-ended questions, thinking outside the Jira story will be a must.
The world moves quickly — sometimes, technology moves faster.”
What qualities and skill sets do you look for in a new tech hire?
Two of the most important traits I seek out and foster in our new hires are adaptability and collaborative drive. The world moves quickly — sometimes, technology moves faster. Keeping up requires a mind seeking new challenges and the ability to pivot along with shifting priorities. Similarly, we work with a breadth of internal and external technologies. While I never expect somebody to come in knowing how to use them all, an eagerness to jump into unfamiliar territory and push oneself is paramount to becoming an effective engineer. Of course, that’s a slow and arduous process on your own. Fortunately, at Yext, we know that we are most effective when we prop one another up and work toward the shared goal of building the best software we can. I see these two traits in everybody I work with here, and it’s why I’ve stuck around. The challenges are intriguing and the opportunities exciting, but the people make Yext unique.
