Over the past decade, Chicago’s tech community experienced rapid growth and opportunity. According to a CBRE report, tech companies accounted for 21 percent of Chicago’s major-office leasing in the first half of 2019, up from 11 percent in 2011.
Furthermore, expansion from the West Coast played a major role: Bay Area tech companies leased 4 million square feet of Chicago office space in 2019 alone. While many in the Chicago tech industry are currently working from home, Techcrunch interviews with venture capitalists report that the effects of 2020’s remote shift might actually help Chicago tech, with more talent availability and cheaper operating costs. With Chicago’s digital startup hub, 1871, taking the award from UBI Global as the best incubator in the world, the opportunities for software engineers seem particularly ripe. But how to choose the right company?
For engineers seeking their ideal match in the Windy City, there are many factors to consider, including the quality and culture of the development team, the breadth of the tools available and the number of interesting and challenging projects at hand. We sat down with six Chicago tech companies hiring engineers and let members of their team share insights about their tech stack, their most interesting projects and what exactly makes their development teams so special.
At Peapod Digital Labs, the e-commerce engine of one of the nation’s largest grocery retail groups, Senior Software Engineer Ankita Sharma is part of the most unique group of all the scrum teams and the only one that contains a full stack. Her front-end team’s responsibility for the whole payments area, including everything from Mastercard to Apple Pay, has provided many exciting challenges, while her team’s scrum model and overall diversity has led to a motivating and enjoyable work environment.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack. What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
My team is the most unique team across all 12 or so scrum teams in PDL because it’s the only team where we have a whole full stack. I have been working on the front-end tech stack with mainly JavaScript; Vue.js framework; webpack for building files, deployment, and minimizing bundles; Tailwind CSS framework for CSS capabilities; SonarQube for automation; and GraphQL for client data services. Our project for the past year has been focused on migrating the old tech stack from AngularJS to Vue.js to increase the website performance and provide a better customer experience. I really like Visual Studio code as an editor or code editor for JavaScript.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
I am the lead of an amazing front-end team responsible for the whole payments area of the e-commerce website, our PRISM website. We give customers the capability to have multiple payment selections like Mastercard, Visa and so on in the “my accounts” area of the website and the ability to add new credit or debit cards or set up a preferred payment. Post-COVID-19, our customer preferences and needs have changed a lot, and we’re consciously working toward offering better experiences with future projects, such as Apple Pay as a payment type, but that’s in the future road map. The project has been critical because it's related to payments, which is a very sensitive part of the customer's information, so we need to make sure we are protecting their information with encryption logic in the code.
Post-COVID-19, our customer preferences and needs have changed a lot, and we’re consciously working toward offering better experiences.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you've been part of?
We follow a lot of Agile scrum practices and have biweekly release cycles of our work, where we can release a new feature that we’ve been working on. We also have daily scrums, which makes a difference. Culturally, I feel like we’re a very diverse group of members, and everyone has so much to bring to the table. We brainstorm ideas and the communication is awesome, which is especially important while working remotely. So we can hop on a Teams call, a Slack call or a Zoom, and try to make sure we’re resolving any issues and having questions answered as much as we can. Every day I get some new challenge or new problem to solve and that's what excites and motivates me to come to work.
Gargi Chipalkatti is a senior software engineer and full-stack developer at Paylocity, an all-in-one HR software platform. Not only does she enjoy the challenges of making the user-experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible, but her team is so full of camaraderie and cohesiveness that they have their own slang and code words.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack. What are some of your favorite tech tools?
I am a full-stack developer. I really enjoy the satisfaction I get in making sure our clients are able to effectively use our products and have a good user experience. For me, finding a coding solution is like solving a puzzle, and any tools that make it easy for me to develop a solution are worth a try. On our team, we use prolific tech tools such as VS Code, VS 2019 and SSMS, along with their plugins.
For me, finding a coding solution is like solving a puzzle.”
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
Before starting work on the payroll as a product team, our team was part of dev-implementation. We were involved with creating and enhancing the tools used by our implementation consultants. Payroll as a product is definitely an interesting challenge.
I am now learning to look at the Paylocity suite as a whole, whereas before, my team’s area of concern was the successful implementation of Paylocity’s clients. My team is involved with making the user experience for our non-payroll clients as enjoyable and smooth as possible. For this purpose, we need to look at all the products Paylocity has to offer, through the eyes of a non-payroll company, keeping in mind their specific needs.
This takes quite a bit of coordination with other teams that are responsible for other products in the suite, and I always end up learning something about the technology that the team uses, or the way of doing work or even the details, as well as capabilities of the various products. We balance our team’s goals and also, try to align them with the goals of other teams.
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you've been part of?
Not only does this team take its work seriously, but we also make sure to listen and keep the bonds of camaraderie alive, just like the other teams. We try and resolve the issues that may come up by reaching out to others as soon as possible. Thanks to a certain team member, we have our own set of slang, such as “brussels sprouts” for issues that need a little finesse. We are most certainly a cohesive team.
At Fast Radius, a 3D printing and molding platform, Software Developer Erin Greenhalgh uses a variety of exciting tools while working on their customer-facing portal. She’s enthusiastic about her team’s ability to surface critical insights, while their open communication and trust makes all the difference in the world.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack. What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
Our stack is built with Elixir and Phoenix on the back end and React on the front end. We take advantage of Elixir’s built-in features for managing concurrent processes and its abstractions over websocket functionality. On the front end, we’re using the latest React features including hooks and context, and we’ve also started integrating TypeScript. Our web app is supported by services in Rust and Python for 3D file parsing and analysis.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
My team is working on our customer-facing portal where you can upload a 3D part file, enter some information about how you’d like it to be manufactured, and get instant feedback about the cost and makeability. It’s exciting from a customer perspective because we’re surfacing critical insights into what affects part makeability. We also have a lot of interesting technical requirements, including working with our data team on cost and part data, real-time UI updates with websockets and creating a smooth and beautiful user experience.
The work is exciting from a customer perspective because we’re surfacing critical insights into what affects part makeability.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
I really appreciate how much the development team fosters open communication, honesty and trust. For me, these all fall under the umbrella of psychological safety, which is a top indicator of an effective team, according to studies done by Google. We have a blameless culture and prioritize learning and knowledge-sharing, which makes working on difficult problems easier.
Manoj Shenda, vice president of cloud infrastructure engineering and services at ServiceNow, knows that what makes his team unique is the passion for solving the customer experience in the cloud, and the enthusiasm for absolutely anything to do with customer experience.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack. What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
We use open source tech like LAMP stack, JavaScript for web application and Java for scalable/distributed frameworks. We use code quality tools like SonarQube and CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Git, and are also a big user of the ServiceNow platform/application for our cloud engineering.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
Building zero interruption, zero-touch cloud from the ground up enables us to build the cloud for ServiceNow hypergrowth, meeting customer experience expectations from our enterprise cloud. Scaling cloud engineering, operation and support with ML/AI enables us to transform into a proactive cloud experience. Cloud automation for public, private and hybrid cloud enables us to use cloud-based on scale, cost and time-to-market.
We are truly customer-obsessed.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you've been part of?
Passion for solving for the customer experience in our cloud. We are truly customer-obsessed. We use the right mix of ServiceNow technology and industry-leading tech stack. We use our own technology to collaborate! I’d say collaboration between ServiceNow Cloud and the platform/product team is also what makes us unique.
Joe Brunner is a senior software engineer at Collective Health, a platform that simplifies employer healthcare. He credits his team with a unique openness to experimentation, even when they are consolidated around a core technology stack, which creates great opportunities for career growth.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack. What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
Collective Health's technology stack is centered around a core set of services built in Java using Spring Boot. We use Docker and Kubernetes for service containerization and orchestration. The front end of our stack is built in React. Beyond this core technology stack, Collective Health has supporting services written in an assortment of languages, such as Scala, Python, Node.js and Go.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
Collective Health provides customized health plans based on data driven insights and specialized program offerings. I am currently working on a redesign of our plan authoring platform that opens new areas of customization while streamlining the workflow for plan creation. This project is exciting because it presents unique technical challenges and it increases our organization’s capacity to deliver a more diverse product offering at a larger scale.
I find Collective Health’s engineering culture unique in its openness to experimentation.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you've been part of?
I find Collective Health’s engineering culture unique in its openness to experimentation. Though we have consolidated around a core technology stack, we continue to look for ways to improve how we do what we do. That means exploring new architectural patterns, creating prototypes with alternative frameworks and testing to see if a different language provides a better solution to a problem. This culture of experimentation creates opportunities for our engineers to grow professionally and lets us evolve our platform to meet business goals as they change over time.
At Catsy, a platform for e-commerce digital asset management, co-founder Jamie Lipitz said he has greatly enjoyed watching his company transform into a top-notch infrastructure and tech company. Critical daily engineering meetings and scaling the back end of the company by adding processors and workers shows Catsy has a collaborative culture and continues to grow.
Give us a bit of insight into your tech stack. What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
From a development point of view, our favorite tools are Bitbucket and IdeaJ. And from infrastructure and hosting, we like the flexibility and scalability we get from AWS, especially for image processing. We process vast number of images. We also like Virtualization for the purpose of flexibility.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
We recently worked on increasing throughput for images and the number of data feeds that Catsy connects to. As we continued to add integrations, we saw an increase in volume across the board. Some of this was not hard, but there were parts of it like resizing images that is a time-consuming process. To account for this, we changed our content processing to be batched and asynchronous. This was a fun project to add processors and workers to scale the back end of Catsy. We are still improving this — it is very much a work in progress. But I enjoy watching us evolve into a world-class infrastructure and tech company.
I enjoy watching us evolving into a world-class infrastructure and tech company.”
What is something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you have been part of?
Only in recent times, brands have realized that they need a platform like Catsy Product Information Management to truly scale e-commerce. We help their team get better at managing content and also help them in sending this data to where it needs to go. So, we are hitting a lot of new use cases that we never encountered before and now we are challenged to solve. What is unique to our engineering org is the way we are addressing these challenges in a distributed yet collaborative manner compared to the past. The one tradition that has really gotten us to work so effectively is our daily engineering meetings.
