Kickin' egos to the curb: Sumo's lead engineer on what happens behind the scenes at this Austin startup

by Kelly O'Halloran
September 19, 2017

Eric Fernandez.jpg

Launched in 2010, Austin-based Sumo provides a suite of free tools that drives traffic to over 500,000 websites without being too obtrusive. We caught up with Sumo’s lead engineer Eric Fernandez to learn how the team supports data from over 65 million users and what challenges he and his colleagues encounter. Here’s what the six-year Sumo employee had to say.

What technologies power Sumo?

Most of our day-to-day is spent working with Node.js, React, Express, MySQL and ElasticSearch, but we often run into technical challenges that require us to use a whole slew of different technologies including Cassandra, AWS Lambda, Red Shift, DynamoDB, Redis, SQS and more. Generally, whatever the problem requires, we'll do our best to find the best tool for the job and run with it.

What are the biggest projects your team is working on right now?

Collecting emails has always been our forte, so a lot of the work we're doing now is giving our clients the ability to engage with the emails and data they've collected.

Not only are we allowing the client to email or send push notifications directly through Sumo, but we’re also enriching the data we get to save our client from engaging with leads that will go nowhere. Some of the plans we have for the future include more ways of engaging with the customer and smarter send triggers.

We're also working on giving our clients the tools they need to determine the best ways of using our tools for their own purposes. Because every client is different and may have a different goal — gaining traffic, collecting emails, making sales, etc. — we're working to design dashboards that give site owners broad overviews of their data along with the ability to drill down into the nitty gritty of their site so that they can get the most out of our tools.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Our team is working on things like automated branding for site owners, optimizing our own product to nail down what's most valuable for clients, live chat and more.

What are the biggest tech challenges your team faces, and how do y’all overcome them?

Everything from getting our product to consistently load the client's forms on their websites to storing and retrieving the immense amount of event data that we collect on behalf of our clients have had their own head-scratching challenges.

Regardless of what the problem is, we have a team of amazing engineers that are able to find new and exciting ways of overcoming the challenges. A problem that seems insurmountable this week will be solved the following week by an engineer who's just had time to mull over the problem and think of a solution — whether it's a new technology that we can use or some batching mechanism that we hadn't thought.

What's special about working on the Sumo engineering team?

Not a week goes by that I'm not impressed by the ingenuity of the people that work here and the amazing things they're able to produce after a few brainstorming sessions and putting our theories to the test.

Every engineer on the team is incredibly talented and capable, but I think what makes us special is that we all really care about each other and what we produce. When I interview people for positions at Sumo, I hear stories of previous companies with infighting, big egos and politics. Very often, that's one of the biggest things that people looking for a career with us are looking to get away from.

We're not perfect and disagreements happen, but it’s always with the understanding that we want to produce the best product we can.

Images provided by company and LinkedIn. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.


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