CloudZero is the leader in proactive cloud cost efficiency.
Bill Buckley, SVP of Engineering, shares everything you need to know about working on the CloudZero Engineering team!
In this Video
Bill discusses:
- Details on the CloudZero Engineering team
- Team Responsibilities and Unique Challenges
- The tech stack
- The interview process
- Why someone should be excited to join the team
Video Transcript
I’m Bill Buckley, the SVP of Engineering here at CloudZero. We are a team of 50 in engineering, organized into what we call product teams. For us, a product team is six to eight engineers with an engineering manager, a product manager, and a product designer. That group owns end-to-end innovation: they do research, design together, implement whatever they’re interested in going after, ensure quality is high, ship it to the cloud, and support it through operations. That end-to-end ownership means these product teams have a great view into what’s moving the needle with our customers.
Our team gets some really fun challenges. We work with some of the best engineering organizations in the world, helping them understand what they’re spending on the public cloud and what’s driving that spending. Some of the challenges start with our data layer and our data platform. We ingest petabytes of data every month from all sorts of different sources—the leading CSPs, SaaS providers, and AI providers. Once we have that data, we have to organize it in a way that’s granular and actionable for all of our customers and then find insights.
That’s way too much data to have our end users go through, so many of our teams get to do really fun things like MLE, anomalies, and insights. We find ways to organize the data so that every single customer doesn’t have to go through all of it; we can personalize it for them, their team, and how their business thinks about it. Getting those granular insights into the data is some of the most fun challenges we have.
Our tech is great. At the base level, we are a SaaS app on AWS, but we use very simple building blocks to build a really complex system. Years ago, we went all-in on serverless, and to this day, we have no containers or EC2 running in production. That means we use services such as Lambda, Step Functions, Dynamo, S3, EventBridge, and API Gateway—and that’s pretty much it. We use those to create a very scalable and event-driven system. Our backend is 100% Python and each one of our services gets its own GitHub repo and a true CI/CD platform; teams are generally pushing to production every single day. Our frontend that our end users interact with is 100% TypeScript. This makes for a great architecture where teams can own small features and move fast, but it’s horizontally scalable to meet the needs of our business.
We have a relatively straightforward interview process. It changes slightly for different roles and responsibilities, but at its base, we start with discussions with the hiring manager and our recruiting team to get more information on the role, your experiences, and what you’re looking for. Once we get through that, we have a really fun take-home technical problem. This gets you to work with data in a fun way with no time limits. You just go and show us how you might solve a small problem with code.
Once we have that, we set up four one-on-one interviews, most of those with other engineers. You can start learning what our team is like, how we operate, and what our culture is. We’ll walk you through a few basic questions: how do you approach system design? How did you approach the take-home? We want to get a sense for how you like solving problems and what kind of environment you like working in. With those three stages, we give you lots of information, and we get lots of information about how you like to solve hard problems with other smart people.
CloudZero is a unique opportunity for engineers. We give people the ability to solve really hard problems in a very cloud-native architecture, but beyond that, it’s very mission-driven. You’re building a platform that is helping other engineers out there in the world build better software. It’s rare in our industry that you get the chance to take a really hard problem and, when we are successful, change how software is built in the cloud for decades to come.
We’re going to help some of the fastest-growing companies—especially with AI tools popping up everywhere—understand what’s driving their spend and how to build more economically viable and useful software. This will allow the whole industry to go much further when it comes to cost observability. It’s rare you get to do both: work on hard problems and change the industry that we all know and love.
