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!

Culture fit first, we like people that want to think about the most important thing for the company (we are 100% transparent on all topics). Then expertise, as a team we search for people that are better than us on at least one topic and that bring something new. The hiring process includes one day in the team with a final presentation on a topic you are passionate about.

We’re looking for talented, passion-driven developers which love to experiment and deliver features.

We have lots of room for personal projects as well, so ownership is definitely one aspect we really appreciate. Humble and grit are also very important personality traits we love in a person: this keeps us motivated and on the same page.

We're definitely still scaling up, and have had to overcome a lot of different challenges along the way. At about ~45 people, we're starting to need more internal processes to make things work smoothly. That said, we're always trying to put Algolia in more people's hands — employees, customers, and end-users.

We are still scaling it up! Most challenging has been and still is scaling the team and culture. We care a lot about the people we hire and would always choose quality over quantity. It makes it difficult to hire fast but is also the main reason of our current success.

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 can find all our Open Source Projects on our brand-new community page:

https://community.algolia.com/

We are definitely willing to release more and more stuff in the near future so keep an eye on us 😉

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

Thanks! instantsearch.js is going well with more than 150 clients using it. We are getting a lot of feedback and will soon make it more compatible with React for example.

All our work is open source BUT the actual algolia engine, mostly because it does not make sense right now to open source it.

It's really great to work on everything open source on a daily basis.

Actually we released today our community website, listing most of our most important open source work: https://community.algolia.com/

Our next open source project should ve https://community.algolia.com/docsearch/, we already open sourced the js part: https://github.com/algolia/docsearch.js and we should be releasing the scraping part soon :)

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".

Yes building a game based on a search engine is doable. We have done one experiment with Imagga image tagging few months ago: blog.algolia.com/robots-vs-humans-who-will-emerge…

I'm not sure what is unique. Every company has a unique culture. Every new hire changes the company culture with what he/she brings.

Still, one important part for me is ownership. I know that most startups say that already, but I've never worked in a company where I had so much freedom into pushing stuff into production quickly and easily. Ownership grants you freedom, but it also comes with accountability, which is fine, because failures are the only real way to learn.

To illustrate that, I feel like the work I actually do is what I would do on my freetime for fun anyway.

Our culture is made up of our values. The values we share between us are trust, care and excellence. Our values could just be seen as any other written words, but we truly believe in them and it translates into our culture. We live by these written words everyday and incorporate them into our day-to-day operations. Beyond the organizational values, Algolia is really an environment in which you can be yourself. We learn from one another, and it’s all about teamwork and collaboration. We have so many different personalities on the team, and everyone is encouraged to push each other to be better. Our organization is pretty flat, and we let our people take ownership on any projects they want. We are fully transparent with the company because we trust everyone; we share our compensation with the team, and our founders share their monthly update newsletter to the investors with the team.

We have company wide happy hours every Thursday and a live stream that’s always on between the two offices. We encourage travel between the Paris and SF offices so we can see each other in person as much as possible.

Long story short, it might sound cheesy, but it all makes for an open, fun work environment that is unlike anywhere I’ve worked before.

What a good question Mayank. This is not something that is easily answered because it feels like Algolia is a new company every 3-6 months. That being said we do have strong core characteristics like Trust, Honesty, etc... but what I think makes us unique is our ability to openly give and accept feedback - every day feels like we're moving 100mph, which means that everything we do we want it to be perfect. So that being said, we want everyone to be able to be 'challenged' on their proposition of a project or idea and make sure that we look at it from all angles. It has allowed us to really refine and improve the actions that we take on everyday tasks.

Our early customers were the ones we converted from the beta. So the question becomes—how did we get our first beta customers? We reached out first to our network and hustled from there. We did a lot of demos and got tons of ‘nos’ or worse, ‘maybes’. But then we convinced a first one, and then a second, and the product improved, the referrals started to come in and it got much easier.

Pitch wise, we focused mainly on the speed. We spoke a lot more about the typo-tolerance than we do today, and one thing that really hasn’t changed at all: we demoed a lot!!! Actually, today, we still (nearly) never use slides in our sales pitches (well, we maybe should sometimes!)

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

and more beer

• load balancing through the api clients
• building an internal data structure answering search as you type
• awesome team

There is no budget for performance, it is a daily focus. We know how easy it is to introduce a regression of performance and how hard it is to always improve it, we work on profiling and benchmarking nearly every single day!

Hint hint jobs@algolia.com ;)

It is hard because you can easily feel the disconnection between the two offices.

What we ask our people is to maximize the opportunities for collaboration between the two offices. Right now the SF office is a lot about HR, culture, marketing while the Paris office is about engineering.

Since we have a blog: https://blog.algolia.com/ we leverage this as a opportunity to collaborate between engineers and marketing team.

A very important part to me is traveling. We ask every employee to travel at least to the other office, SF or Paris. This is working very well because as soon as you travel to the other office, you can feel and experiment a direct link with people.

To ease this process, we have corporate apartments in both cities, near the office.

One thing that has not been mentioned yet: the culture. We really value ownership a lot and that’s enabling us to make decisions without have to refer to each other all the time. We trust people to make the best decisions and to make sure they can do so, we are very transparent about basically everything that’s happening and prefer to over-communicate than keep things to ourselves. We also encourage everyone at the company to travel to the other office at least once a year. We have usually between 2 and 5 people from Paris in SF at any time, for example :) That’s helping a lot and makes sure everyone can get to know each other! Oh and we only speak English, including in the French office where we have currently 5 non-native French speaking employees \o/

We also always have a huge travel budget plus a corporate flat in Paris and SF. Everyone in the team go to the remote office on a regular basis

And a lot of people working remote!

45 and we plan to double the size of the team before end of the year :)

You can have a peek at our current team here:

https://www.algolia.com/about

Scroll down and behold: The Algolia Team is actually indexed on Algolia 🙌

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/

Our first offline SDK is still used in several mobile apps. I remember one benchmark with one index of 1M record having search performance under 50ms on a old Iphone 3GS. Seems so old right now ... but we have kept most of the algorithms and datastructures in our SaaS API.

Yes it is true! We basically saw so many unanswered questions on StackOverFlow about how to implement Lucene in mobile apps that we thought it would be a great problem to tackle :) The thing is the market was not as great as we expected/hoped or maybe more difficult to penetrate. We did, however, get a lot of positive feedback about the UX of the search with people wanted to do the same thing online. So we pivoted :) And that was one of our best decisions! We rapidly realized that all the choices we made for mobile were great fits for user-facing search! Because of the hardware constraints of mobile, we couldn’t use the traditional search approaches used by Elasticsearch for example. The form factor also drove a lot of our decisions (instant display of results as you type, typing mistake tolerance, factoring geo-distance in the ranking, etc.). In the end it shaped the technology and is a big reason for our current success :) We probably never would have made the same choices had we started on servers.

Redux is working great so far. Separating data logic from the views/component is liberating. It is also really easy to test the actions and reducers because they are just pure functions. We are still trying to find ways to decrease the boilerplate though (we have something in the works for this :).

Re testing components: on the website, we use a combination of airbnb’s enzyme and our very own vvo’s expect-jsx

We started testing React components with expect-jsx: https://github.com/algolia/expect-jsx that we built. But then testing for events is a bit tricky, we explain it on our blog blog.algolia.com/how-we-unit-test-react-component….

Right now the airbnb project called enzyme http://airbnb.io/enzyme/ seems to be the most promising testing library.

I also believe the React team is working hard to make all this easier. Right now it's a bit tricky to know how to test React.

We are currently unit testing our reducers by using mocha, chai.js and sinon.js while we're using expect-jsx for integration / functional tests.

So far Redux has proven to be very helpful in helping us handle state updates without undesired side effects: we managed to remove most of the local state from our UI components. The only downside we found is a little bit too much boilerplate code, especially when handling asynchronous flows. It’s definitely working well for us, we 💖React and Redux!

We are growing super fast and, as a result, we invest a lot in recruiting. It depends a lot on the position, of course, but our recruitment is a mix of outbound contact, referrals from friends/colleagues, and people who are excited about Algolia and want to work with us.

Most of our team right now is in Paris, with the rest in SF. By the end of the year, we’re hoping for half and half in each city.

The recruitment process was among the best that I’ve experienced before. The team was very thorough (I spoke with 6 people before flying to Paris for a day on-site) and made sure that we were good fits for each other, while at the same time eschewing the “trivia” that you see in a lot of tech interviews. Throughout the whole process, I really felt like the team was being supportive and almost cheering for me to do well, even as it was clear that they had a high bar to clear. It was a good insight into how the team works on the day to day.

I can say confidently that for the right people, Algolia will help with the visa process because I’m going through it right now. ;)

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 ;)

As a San Francisco-based employee, I’ll just add that smaller can be better! Team size! I mean team size!

Also, a key part of the interview process is a presentation to the whole team. The subject varies based on your role and it can be a bit intimidating, but we’re a supportive and curious group. I think it works well for our candidates and for our selection process.

We have more than 3000 active applications using us. We process more than 30 billion API calls per month. Algolia customers include: Vevo, Periscope, Quiksilver, Medium, Product Hunt, A Little Market (an Etsy company), CrunchBase, HackerNews, Genius.com and Livestream. We unfortunately cannot comment on our biggest customers because of NDAs... this is so sad :(

We actually have an NDA with a lot of our big customers, but the main public ones are Medium, Periscope, Vevo, Product Hunt, CrunchBase, DigitalOcean.

Regarding numbers, I think we are live on around ~1300 paying customers (and one customer can have several websites/mobile applications). We also have more than 4500 (free) Hacker plans.

Short version: awesome! It would take a long time to cover all the great things about YC like the really smart and experienced partners, incredible batch mates you’re going to have, and the very helpful network of alumni… If I had to only pick one thing, I’d say that the experience of moving the full team (6 of us at that time) to the Bay Area was the most impactful. We worked and lived together for 3 months out of a house we rented in Menlo Park. Participating in a YC batch is very intense, and doing that all together from the same place, basically working night and days for 3 months, contributed a lot to our team and culture.

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.

"You need the YES to win again the NO". (c) French Politician (including typos)

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!"

Well its up to you Mr Bowie

It’s true that our hiring process is quite long. But this is because we really want to make sure that we, as a team, would like to work with the new hire.

If we ask our potential hires to spend a full day at the office, it’s to show them how life at Algolia really is, so they can see if that it is what they had in mind. On the other hand, it lets us spend some time with them, discussing various topics and have a “gut feeling” if we’d like to work together.

There’s something unique in working with smart and brilliant people who share your same passion for the product and love to get shit done while having fun at the same time.

It’s definitely important for us to know the person behind the candidate and see how they can complement your daily job with their skills and personality. That’s why it’s so hard to hire the right people and why it takes so much time to build the right team.

We keep hiring "better than us", it's really something you always need to focus on. Our team is composed by customer-centric people, crazy about fixing all the broken search bars we're used to use everyday: we all want to fix them!!!

We redesigned from scratch how search engines work, mainly to fix the following issues:

• Relevance: we provide a different approach to relevance that gives you a predictable ability to mix textual relevance and business date (We know well the pain of trying to tune the big relevance mathematical formula: you improve one query but you degrade a lot of others. We use a n-dimensions sort, also known as tie-breaking, to make sure you always have control over your relevance.

• Performance: we optimize everything at the millisecond level, and our goal is to make it impossible to do it faster :) We have a unique infrastructure deployed in 36 data centers across 15 regions and software optimized at the millisecond. Focus: we’ve designed our engine to reproduce the experience you would get on Google or Amazon on any website, focusing on the user-facing search experience. The one you use every day, handling typo-tolerance & providing results in real-time -> it turns out that this is a lot different than analytics, dashboarding or alerting that the competition is focusing on.

• UI/UX: we don't only provide the engine but expert advice and libraries to deliver a great UX

• Dev-friendliness: we are developers, so we know the joy of using a well designed API

• Support: the developers building the product are the ones doing the support, and we don’t plan to change that anytime soon

If you're building a user-facing search bar and you want a search experience that looks like you have on Google and Amazon, we're definitely the best fit. That's because we've designed our engine to handle as-you-type search & typing mistakes and injecting business data in the ranking algorithm to provide your users the best text & business relevance.

We're also Elasticsearch users, we use it for its analytic/aggregation capabilities: we're building analytics on top of our end-user queries (just to be clear: we're NOT using Elasticsearch for the Algolia search API). It's a very good piece of software but we don't use their ranking or full-text search capabilities.

Via automation, monitoring and alerting :) We automate everything we can (we mainly use Chef), we monitor like crazy (currently we monitor over 250,000 metrics, and more than 10k points/seconds and still growing) and we have alerts on everything that could be wrong, even slow indexing or slow queries. Despite all of that, we add new metrics every week. The logistics are a pretty important part of our jobs. Finding and dealing with a big number of providers worldwide is part of our job.

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.

Oh btw, we have more than 400 servers now :)

One very important part is the API. We strive to always make it backward compatible. If we introduce a new feature or new syntax, we make sure the previous syntax is still working.

We’d rather update the documentation to stop mentioning an old feature than removing it from the engine. Sometimes, when we really need to change a behavior, we inspect our logs to get the list of potential affected customers and proactively contact them to warn them about the coming change.

Talking about our website and dashboard we deploy from 5 to 20 times per day using capistrano and Travis CI without any particular problem. It’s a very simple setup but it works pretty well in practice: if something goes wrong we just rollback to the previous working version. We rely a lot on automated tests but when things goes wrong we usually fix the issue as soon as possible.

I'm happy that our software engineers responded before operations kicked in ;) I think that illustrates it well :)

We propose a mongodb connector that will import and synchronize all your data on Algolia. To do that we’ve built a MongoDB connector acting as a MongoDB replicate forwarding every single operation to your Algolia index. That being said, from our experience doing a simple MongoDB collection ⇔ Algolia index mapping is not enough and we highly recommend using one of our API clients to synchronize your MongoDB collection with our engine using a few lines of code.

We’re both doing search but in a totally different way. Google indexes web pages and try to detect which pages are relevant based on 200+ ranking web criteria.

On the other hand, we’re helping developers to build their internal search engine by providing them all they need to customize the ranking/relevance of their search based on business knowledge/data. Most of the time, the data you use to customize the Algolia ranking is not public and cannot be guessed by Google: number of sales, number of page views, etc...

That would explain the cute little car (google.com/selfdrivingcar/images/home-where.jpg) that’s always parked outside of our office. ;)

More seriously, we see Algolia as complementary to Google. Sometimes you want to search for general information across multiple sites, and Google really is still the best at that. And sometimes you want to search just through a specific site, and that’s where we think we’re creating a much better experience--both for website/app owners and for their users.

Our engine is built from scratch, without any existing database technology. The data structures we use to “index” all objects and power the search & filtering features have been built based on 10+ years of experience working with Natural Language & Search Engines.

Our website is hosted on AWS, and we rely on a highly available MySQL (using RDS). Our API uses our own binary data structure. We have built everything with efficiency in mind, maximizing usage of CPU-cache, in order to reply in a few milliseconds.

We don’t have any plan between the STARTER & GROWTH plan but we provide an over-quota policy which allow you to go over the 100.000 records (or 1.000.000 operations) allowed in your STARTER plan.

We’re also happy to provide vouchers to all non-funded startups to help them grow. We know how difficult it can be at the beginning :)

We also have custom Community plans for open-source projects. This is our way to give back to the community. Just contact us and I’m sure we can find something for you.