Between a $20 million funding round and nearly 70 new hires, the past year has been something of a whirlwind for Snapsheet. When Adam Pendleton joined the insurance technology provider early last year, he was one of seven developers. Now there’s 35.
“I’d been at companies where growth squashed the culture, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised that we’ve been able to maintain ours,” said Pendleton. “Everyone we’ve hired has integrated well into the team, and I haven’t really felt like anyone has come in who didn’t bring something new to the table and contribute right away.”
We spoke with him to learn more about the inner workings of Snapsheet’s growing technology team.
What’s your role at Snapsheet?
I’m a back-end developer on the platform team. We develop and maintain new products, including the new payments platform. Our goal is to build a very easy-to-use system, which is a challenging thing to do when dealing with finance.
What makes it challenging?
We deal with a lot of requirements, both legal ones and really specific technical ones. You can’t get it wrong, and everything needs to be verified. We’re also trying to expand the platform with a lot of features, so we need to build a system that can handle expansion and work for a lot of different users and carriers.
But the most interesting thing we’re working on is our machine learning initiative. We get hundreds of thousands of claims and photos of cars every day, so we’re looking for ways to process them before anyone has to look at them.
What parts of that process can you automate with machine learning?
We get a lot of photos of people’s feet, or that are too dark or taken at a bad angle. Sorting through those is a huge bottleneck for support staff. Using our data, we can identify whether a photo is viable for estimating. If not, our system can tell the user to take a new photo.
How involved are you in shaping what your final products will look like?
The team is developing the platform pretty independently and helping to shape the specifications. We’re also all involved in multiple projects, so we’re dealing with the full stack and allocating resources based on what we feel is necessary.
Which technologies do you use?
We use Ruby on Rails for our back end, and our data science team uses a lot of Python. For our database, we use Redis and mySQL. On the front end we’re doing a lot of React, and we’re building AI components using TensorFlow. Everyone who’s come in has brought new technology with them, which is something I love about working here.
We divvy up responsibilities, but it’s usually with the mindset that we want people to know what’s going on throughout the stack. I had actually never used Ruby on Rails in a professional setting before I showed up. What’s more important is the constant craving for learning new things.
What is your favorite thing about working at Snapsheet?
It’s a very idea-centric culture, and we’re given a lot of freedom and trust to identify problems and come up with creative solutions. We have hack days twice a month that people take really seriously, where we can work on whatever we want and try to learn anything we want. I discovered the image recognition technology that laid the framework for what we’re doing with photos now during a hack day.
Image via Snapsheet.
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