About SevenRooms and what they do
Hi, I'm Kinesh. I'm CTO and co-founder here at SevenRooms. I've been here since day one building the company with Joel and Ali. And I lead and run the engineering team here at SevenRooms. So we're responsible for building scaling and maintaining the cloud based platform that serves our 1000s and 1000s of customers all across the globe. We have customers all over the world. In 250 cities, we are in every single timezone and every single Geo, and the cloud system has been built to scale to those customers and beyond by our wonderful team here at SevenRooms, who engineer it.
Details on their platform
SevenRooms is a guest experience and retention platform. But what does that really mean? What it means is we provide a suite of tools to restaurant operators to help run their business remarket to their guests, but also understand the business from a data perspective. And so I think about three different areas, how do we acquire customers for restaurants? How do we engage them when you're providing their product, the food? And how do you retain them? How do you keep them coming back, we have technology that addresses every part of the guests journey, and helps improve restaurant outcomes in each of those three areas.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
The engineering team here at SevenRooms, build support scales and maintains the cloud system that powers our hospitality operators. And in a nutshell, our team members are going to be spending their time either building the product, releasing new features, scaling our entire infrastructure and systems and supporting and maintaining it. I think a lot of people have asked me, you know, what kind of computer science problems and engineering problems are there in restaurants, I think if you ask the average person on the street, what kind of problems are they probably say, well, it's just a restaurant, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, when we think about the problem of hospitality, it's actually an area that's been underserved by technology for many, many years. There have always been those transactional systems to book a reservation, or to check out with the point of sale. But there's never really been a system that ties the guests journey all together in one place. And that's really the power of SevenRooms, we're taking your diner guests journey, when they're discovering the restaurant, you're interacting with the brand, you're ordering your booking, but then you're showing up in person, you're engaging with the experience with the product. And then also getting marketed to afterwards, or driving loyalty through offers that entire end to end experience and that customer journey, having it be memorable for you and have it being a true experience. That's really what we're trying to do. And when we think about the engineering and product teams, that's what we're trying to do. And in many of those cases, they're really interesting computer science problems to solve. If you think about, for example, the layout of a floor plan in a restaurant that can be viewed as a Tetris grid and packing the Tetris grid tightly is actually a way to generate more revenue for a restaurant more people proceed per hour. If you think about the problem of marketing to a new guest, who comes how do you know if a certain appetizer actually causes that guest to test him to come back a second, third or fourth visit. These are all data science problems, and algorithm problems that can be solved in the hospitality industry with engineering.
Details on the tech stack
SevenRooms is built as a cloud native platform. We're built on Google Cloud today. Our tech stack is we're running Python on the server, and we run TypeScript with react on the front end. So fairly modern setup, we utilize all kinds of different cloud native services provided by Google to power everything from our web page and web portals, to our mobile synchronization service, to the front end technology that powers the user experience. We also have a universal iOS application that's written in Swift, and it's used in host stands all across the world.
What to expect during the interview process
The interview process at SevenRooms for engineering is a multi round process. But our goal is to try to keep it compact, but be thorough, we really want to get to know you as a candidate, we really want you to get a taste of what we can do at SevenRooms and what we're all about. And so typically, it'll start by meeting with the hiring manager or recruiter at the company. And we'll go through a couple of rounds. Some of the rounds are really based on a technical assessment. So understanding your abilities from a programming standpoint, if it's a technical role, or product strategy, and product architecture, if it's a product role, and then diving deeper into system architecture, engineering, design, quality, performance, scalability, and lastly, Leadership, Culture and Communication. We really care about having a team that collaborates and is transparent. And we highly value ownership at the company. And so we really look for candidates that can fit that profile and be a true member of the team.
About SevenRooms' culture
SevenRooms, the word culture, a special meeting, I think a lot of places it can just imply Hey, are we getting together for a happy hour. But really, we think of culture very differently here. We think of culture as the fabric and the way which guide our decision making and The way we get things done at SevenRooms. And so when I think about some of the values that drive our culture, they're shared amongst all of us. Ownership is top of the list for me, we really, we really value people who can take ownership of not only the job that they've been asked to do, but to really own a function and really own an area, that's an interest for the company, we really want to be transparent. So putting everything on the table, usually when we have more voices in the room, we lead to a better outcome. And then lastly, changing up the menu, just being very innovative in our approach to things it's very easy when companies scale and they get much larger, to think about process and doing business as usual. But SevenRooms, we really value innovation as well. So bringing creativity to the workplace. And really providing that perspective, combined with customer obsession is going to be important to our growth.
Why now is the ideal time to join
I believe this is the best time to join SevenRooms for multiple reasons. First, is really an Industry and Market reason. If you think about hospitality, technology as a sector, you know, 10 years ago, it was super early restaurants, were still getting educated about the value of data and technology. There weren't that many platforms out there. And they were really reliant on things that were built in the.com Bubble back in 2000. And think about 10 years from now, all of the modern platforms that are cloud based will be built. And so the sweet spot is right now, this is when the industry of market has been ready. In many ways. COVID has educated on a faster timeline, the entire restaurant space, they're really understanding how important technology is to operate their guests experience and also operate their businesses. So really great time from an industry and market standpoint. The second thing is SevenRooms is in growth mode. I know there's concern broadly about the economy at this time. But really, restaurants have come out of the worst part of their history for the COVID. And everyone is actually thriving. And so seven rooms has been building this business over the last 10 years and really is in a perfect position to take advantage of that market opportunity. We're also consistently ranked as one of the best places to work, you're really going to enjoy collaborating with this team. We have a variety of people from different backgrounds and different experience levels. But everyone is in a player looking to make a huge impact. One of the things that we really love about our culture here and is a reason why people stay here is that they love working with the team. It's really about the people at the end of the day. And so when I think about combining all those things together, having great product market fit, having the right market conditions and having an amazing team with a company that's at the right point in its was directory. Now is really the time to join a company
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
