Julien's comment answers it well :+1: We definitely plan to keep improving our abilities to scale up & down as fast (dynamically?automatically?) as possible -> it's always a matter of focus & priorities. Right now, our current elasticity capabilities covers 99% of the use-cases we're targeting.

Tough question :) We look for humble engineers we can trust and who are really willing to fix all those broken search bars we're using every day. Hiring better than us, never compromise the culture, entrepreneur mindset is a plus!

Today: 45 people, +400 servers \o/ Exactly 1 year ago: 12 peoples, 80 servers /o\ Building the team and the infra was definitely tough :)

You should look at our new http://community.algolia.com/ , all open-source \o/

More seriously, here is how we tackled the ranking issues every website/app experience while trying to build a relevant search: https://blog.algolia.com/search-ranking-algorithm-unveiled/ :)

I think that's totally doable with Algolia. You just need to build an index with records that look like: { "objectID": 42, // ... other attributes "tags": ["my tag", "another tag"] } Then you just need to render the JSON our engine is answering to build your "visual search".

Harder than expected /o\ We try to think async-first :) So: all news/feedback/comment that would impact more people than the ones you're currently working with should be via email, GitHub issues, Asana task or Trello card. Don't consider whiteboards /o\

Yes that's true :) We first designed our engine to run on mobile phones: building a small SDK you would embed in your mobile application. After a few months, we had a very good search engine, running on the cheapest Android phone (with no RAM, no CPU, no Disk) but the business was tough. It turns out that our users had exactly the same needs on their websites; so we just pivoted to SAAS: kept the same engine, hosted on clusters of 3 high-end machines \o/

Testing React components is tough, you've so many way to test them :) We've written a blog post about it here: https://blog.algolia.com/how-we-unit-test-react-components-using-expect-jsx/

We were 6 people sleeping/working/eating/living in the same house during 4 months. It turns our than as soon as you work 18 hours per day, only focusing on your product & users; ensuring you keep a 10% growth from one week to another; you really understand what are the next steps you need to build to make your product better.