About Paperless Parts and what they do
Paperless Parts is the secure estimating and quoting software for advanced manufacturing, we enable job shops to make smarter, more informed decisions. So our vision is to empower job shops and contract manufacturers to triage quote, and when work, we do it through automation and intelligence based analysis of technical data. And if I can real briefly to set some of the context around that customers are the contract manufacturer of high precision parts and things we see around us every day. Think about a SpaceX, for example, SpaceX doesn't really build most of the things that goes into what they build, they send that work out to 1000s of advanced manufacturing shops across the country. And it's those companies that are our customers. So they receive requests from a company like SpaceX to build something and they go to a rocket or a satellite, those companies need to analyze that information, estimate it quoted back. And so that's what our product does is helps those manufacturers, analyze the data, manage the workflow and ultimately drive better business and move the supply chain along faster.
Details and size of their engineering team
Yeah, we are a team in engineering of about 30 people. And so that's across Ghana back end, front end, full stack engineers includes our platform engineering key partners, with product owners and designers. So we work in really tightly aligned Scrum teams that have a real strong sense of ownership and entrepreneurial spirit.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
Three things going on right now that are fun to highlight, I think one, and this is the big buzzword. But of course, we're doing exciting things in AI. And so we've been working this year of looking at our AI and ML solutions. And so we deal with a lot of complex technical data. And so we've been using AI models and the robust data set, we have to look at how we better extract information from the technical drawings that come into our platform, our whole job is helping estimators understand what they're looking at, and surfacing these complex details. So made a lot of great progress. Here, we're beta testing a number of things and have big new launches, coming out in 2024, around us. Second thing is around, quote, setup automation. So everything we do is around estimating and quoting. And so we've been for probably the last four or five months working on a robust set of features to expand this capability. And this is really kind of the classic move fast product design engineering effort, lots of great UI rats, lots of good complex work we're doing under the hood. And this is something we run through in closed customer betas. And we've been iterating really quickly with beta customers. And then we'll move that into full GA launch in the coming couple of months. So exciting kind of product capability there. And the third one that has been really exciting for us to drive is around a platform engineering evolution. So we've been evolving from kind of a classic cloud DevOps model into a true platform engineering paradigm, where we're really looking at our cloud infrastructure and release capabilities as a product to the rest of our product engineering team. And so that's really helping us create a secure, consistent, repeatable pattern, and a set of tools that help our software engineers maximize the time they spent building product. So we're well into this evolution. It's a long, long road ahead of us. But it's it's a really exciting way to kind of enable everyone to move a lot faster.
Details on their tech stack
We are a modern react, Python, Postgres is running on AWS, it's the core stack that we have. And so we have found that this has been really effective for us bringing in new engineers, co ops, engineers straight out of college, they can get working effectively. We do use other languages for specific elements. For example, we do a lot of complex geometric analysis, and that's in C++. And we've been experimenting with rust as a language to use to improve performance and some of those capabilities. And we use additional data source for key areas of what we do. So we're using elastic search for search capabilities. Across site. We use document DB for data that we pull in through integrations with our customers. We are cloud native, we put a focus overall on maintaining streamline technology ecosystem, and really helping to, you know, help engineers have a strong quality of life and be able to enable rapid development.
What to expect during the interview process
Yeah, we've been really focused in the process on doing two things. One is trying to ensure that we're putting a number of people in front of the candidates so of course there's always we're evaluating candidates. We know candidates are evaluating us and so we try to put a number of people in front of candidates they get a good feel for it. for who we are. And we try to do this pretty rapidly. So we'll always start with an HR and then a technical performance screen, understand, make sure we're on the same page as far as what the role is what we're looking for. And when we bring candidates in, we're bringing candidates in for an extended period, probably a half day and we go through, it'll be a series of one on one interview. So I'm with staff and principal, engineers, managers, and I will be in on those interviews myself. And then the real fun part of this is we do go through a collaborative coding test and a collaborative design session. And so these are, you know, perfect, Go code something perfectly to a given spec, it is a collaborative process, where we bring a few engineers in the room and sit down and work with candidates to understand how they think about problems, talk through solutions, and really get a feel for how they would work together. So we will walk through that process for roles that are manager roles or slightly more senior roles, we do introduce a bar raiser interview into the product, as well. So we'll bring someone else from another function and to bring an additional perspective, let the candidate meet someone else, and have another function help evaluate the kind of leaders that we're building into the organization.
Why you should be excited to join their team
Okay, there's three things I think about. I've been in technology for 25 plus years at this point, and I will say, this is I have never worked for a company that is more genuinely customer centric than Paperless Parts, it was the thing that ultimately led me to choose to to work here. We love our customers. And honestly, they do want loss. And I think it makes for an incredible culture. So it's a smart, highly energetic group of people working really closely together to solve customer problems. And everyday people are very focused on really trying to make the lives and the businesses better for our customer. Second, it we are a relatively small team here. And we're working really quickly to solve complex issues and deliver great product. And so within an engineering organization, we put a lot of emphasis on great technologies, helping people work quickly shipping code quickly, we're shipping code multiple times per day. And so engineers coming in will really feel like they can ramp up quickly and really have a strong impact on the business and be moving meaningful code faster the system and have a lot of fun solving problems doing it. Lastly, I didn't one of the things that I have found, and we hear from candidates all the time. That's super exciting. And I think refreshing is that our customers are building real physical things around us every day. And so a ton of sass companies are creating software for others as companies. And I've worked in plenty of these companies. So there's nothing wrong with that. There's a great ecosystem there. But ultimately, what a lot of people find missing is it's software building for software, people come here and they realize the excitement of working with customers that are build building real physical things. And the engineering that goes into it in that time, is something we find people really get excited about. And honestly I think of it is we're bridging the software cloud world of ones and zeros with a very physical world of the things that we see every day and are amazed by And so really, I think that means that we are here, a place for builders
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
