About SplitSpot and what they do
SplitSpot is an online marketplace for apartment rentals. So we really seek to connect potential renters or tenants, to landlords to rent individual rooms or apartments. So if you're moving to a big city, and it's a bit intimidating to potentially afford a studio apartment, you can rent out one bedroom of a three or four-bedroom apartment and pay a lot less, but get the same amount of space or more space. And we will handle all of the logistics, connect with your roommate, handle utility payments, all of that we coordinate through us, so you don't need to worry about if one of your roommates decides to leave their lease early or not pay utilities that month. That's not your fault. SplitSpot takes care of all that for you.
Details on SplitSpot's engineering team
SplitSpot's engineering team is fairly new. So I joined the company about four months ago, which was the start of our engineering team. Since then, we've been able to grow pretty rapidly. We're up to now, me plus three other members. And we're a very globally diverse team. So we right now have one member in Nigeria, one member in Pakistan, and one member in Costa Rica, and myself in the Boston area. Throughout all of that global distribution, we really take time to collaborate together. So we have five hours of overlap throughout our day that we are all working together on things. And as far as where the team is structured, I'm the director of engineering. And the other three engineers all work under me. And in addition, we also have an analytics team that is kind of running side by side with an engineering team. And there's some cross-collaboration overlap between those initiatives as well. And that analytics team is mostly based in Nigeria, in that capacity.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
So right now at SplitSpot, we are working on a total rewrite of our website. So previous to the engineering team starting up a few months ago, the main SplitSpot website was a Wix-based website, and the company's primary database was Google Sheets. So neither of those are the most scalable solutions out there. So right now our team is really ripping out and replacing the heart of SplitSpot with a new Ruby on Rails based application. Once we have that new application established, the possibilities are pretty endless. So we see over the next six months starting to really build out the tenant facing side of our product, and really starting to improve the application process improve everything you see once you land on SplitSpot, to make it as easy and as fast as possible for potential renter to find the apartment, make an application, and eventually get a lease signed. Whereas right now that process can be a little bit clunkier than we'd like.
Details on the tech stack
So at SplitsSpot our tech stack is Ruby on Rails. So we are primarily rail shop. And at the moment, we are not using a front-end framework, in particular, we're relying on hotwire which is a combination of turbo and stimulus javascript. In the long term, that's probably not where we're gonna land, we will likely end up with something like react on the front end. Right now we found using hot wire to empower our team to move really quickly and get the right level of interactivity on the front end that our users are looking for. As we get bigger, and as our new features are being developed, we'll likely pull in some more frameworks. But at this point, those have really suited us as well as using Bootstrap to style to allow the team to move as fast as possible and deliver quality software to our users.
What to expect during the interview process
The interview at SplitSpot is a fairly simple process. As an engineer, the first step is a cultural phone screen, about a 30-minute phone call with me to see if you're going to be a good fit at SplitSpot. If you pass that round, we then move on to our technical take-home assessment. That's a one-hour take-home assessment maxed out at one hour, and most candidates usually finish it in 45 and 55 minutes. Again, if you then pass that round, you're on to our final round, which is a three-hour assessment broken up into four slots, two of which are cultural and will be with members of the company's senior team, either the co-founders or head of marketing or sales. And the other two are tactical and you'll get to work with and meet with other members of our engineering team and will test you on some front-end work as well as back-end technology response.
Why now is the ideal time to join
If you join the SplitSpot engineering team, you'll be able to make an immediate impact as we're such a small team any employee is going to make a huge difference in our process, on our technology. And because our application is brand new, it was created in the last few months, you get to work in all the latest and greatest technologies, and really a greenfield application. It's really hard to be able to do that at a startup, but especially at a startup where there already is a proven product-market fit. And so it's a nice safe place where we get to innovate and work on technology as fast as possible. But we also know we've already found a great user base, and we really get to refine and hone in our skills and improve our product incrementally.
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