All the client are open-sourced: https://github.com/algolia We have DocSearch on the way: https://community.algolia.com/docsearch/ . It's a crawler & indexer for documentation. But you can already try it, just check the website!

And beer, mostly beer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer

And a lot of people working remote!

We collaborate a lot with Slack. We are 40ish people and have 151 channels! We also have a weekly meeting with all the team, SF & Paris, to synchronise everyone on important mater: Hirings, new products/features, business, and so on.

Most of the team is in Paris, France. And getting a VISA for France is much easier than getting one for the US. In Paris, we have 5 different nationalities (French, American, Italian, Indian, Czech). We still do not have germans, jobs@algolia.com ;)

It's a guy who just went out of prison. He seeks a job, and every interview he goes to ask him if he knows how to speak english. But he can't. So he searches for english courses, but he is broke. One day he found a very cheap course on the newspaper. So he goes to the place. Rings, and a guy answers him: He asks: "is it here for the english courses?" The guy answer: "If, if, between!"

Testing, testing, testing. We automate a lot of stuff, including unit & integration testing. Furthermore, if we need to do a breaking change, we deploy it incrementally and check our metrics to ensure everything is working well. For example, if we need to change the contract between 2 services. We deploy the new version of the producer, adapt the consumer to this new contract, then remove the old code from the producer.

Automation, automation, automation (and some automated testing). First of all, all our service are resilient. We try to have 2n+1 clusters for every service we provide. Because Algolia is not only a search engine, but also an analytics platform, a monitoring system, a website, and so on.

Hiring is a very difficult topic. We have a very long hiring process. I had more than 8 interviews, a full day with my potential colleagues and a home assignment. I think the best advice is : “do not underestimate hiring”. If someone has a reserve on any future employee, just stop the process and seek the next one. One bad hiring can costs you a lot.