# Heap Engineering Team Smart, fun, talented, thoughtful, and driven — you won’t find a better group of people to work with than our Engineering team! But don’t take our word for it; read on to see what some of our engineers have to say about what it’s like to work at Heap. ## Data Platform Team **Location:** US - Remote **Joined:** July 2021 - Heap is a small company with big data ambitions, and my team is the one that designs, builds and supports the platform where that big data lives. Our data ingestion pipelines and storage make it possible for our customers to perform almost arbitrary analyses on their users’ data at Heap. - The recruiter helpfully explained the interview expectations beforehand. Each interview posed interesting questions delivered by Heap engineers or managers. I felt respected throughout and got insightful responses to questions I had both during and after the interviews. - Engineering and company leadership I felt I could trust, an opportunity to work on a team dedicated to the data platform in a small but growing company, and the genuine warmth of everyone that I spoke with at Heap. - The experience of a fast-paced and challenging environment where work-life balance is valued. ## Web Team **Location:** New York City, NY **Joined:** May 2020 - The #1 thing I care about is the people I get to work with. Heap is a place that cares a lot about its people and culture. I’ve stayed at Heap because my team is incredible! It’s full of driven people who are extremely kind, like to learn, and are not afraid to speak their minds. - Heap trusts its engineers a lot to make good decisions and to do meaningful work. I’ve had a lot more freedom at Heap to pursue work I think is valuable in the way that I think is most effective. There’s a lot of trust here and the results come through in the great work we’re able to do. - We work to make the Heap web application easier for our customers to manage reports and event definitions and share insights. We are currently revamping how filters work on dashboards to help customers pick out the information relevant to them. - I really liked working on the naming conventions tool that we shipped which allows admins to create a list of predefined prefixes to be put on event names. This keeps names consistent and helps reduce account entropy. ## Capture Team **Location:** Austin, Texas **Joined:** August 2019 - The capture team is responsible for developing the SDKs which bring data into Heap. Capture is super interesting because we have to do some pretty complex work in arbitrary applications safely. It’s definitely not your normal “shuffle this data between a UI and a database” kind of work. If you’re more of a “answer questions on Stack Overflow” than a “copy answers from Stack Overflow” person, Capture is the team for you. - At my previous employer, adding and changing product analytics code was by far the most tedious part of my job. When I learned what Heap did, my first thought was, “Wow this is really cool!” Followed by, “I can’t believe I’ve wasted weeks of my life adding tracking code.” Even with existential dread setting in, it was clear that I needed to be part of solving a real problem that I personally have experienced. - I was surprised at how much leeway I had to just go out and change things that I thought were bad. A month into my time at Heap, I was talking to my manager and, as an off-hand remark, suggested that the existing customer rollout procedure for heap.js was kind of funky. My manager agreed, and a week later, the change to the rollout procedure was implemented and we were using it. - 1. An understanding of how large-scale data systems work (and don’t).  2. A very intimate (borderline too intimate) understanding of how browsers work.  3. How to write technical documents in a way that’s appropriate for a given audience.  But the most important thing I’ve learned is what it looks like when a bunch of welcoming, warm-hearted, wickedly smart people do incredible work together. ## Data Science Team **Location:** US - Remote **Joined:** September 2019 - We work closely with the product engineering teams to bring data science-powered features to the Heap app. I’m currently working on implementing a new analysis feature that was proposed, prototyped, and validated by our team. And I’m analyzing data to see how to improve the feature even more based on how our beta users are interacting with it. - There are 5 of us right now — 3 data scientists and 2 data science software engineers. The team is very collaborative and supportive of each other. We typically work on separate projects with different engineering teams, but we check in on Zoom once a day to see if anyone needs help on anything and chat on Slack throughout the day. Once a week we do a working session where one person tells us what they’ve been working on and we all work together to give feedback and try out some new ideas. - Co-leading our Heap Pride ERG. When I started at Heap we only had a few members, and we’ve grown a ton since then. We have a Slack channel and host virtual social events and we’ve brought in some great guest speakers. - My managers have been really supportive of my growth. I recently moved to the data science team from a mostly frontend focused product engineering team because it aligns more closely with my goals. My previous manager advocated for the move for me and my new manager started making opportunities for me to work with him on data science projects even before I was on his team. ## Devops Team **Location:** Australia **Joined:** September 2017 - My team (called Bedrock) works on production infrastructure and the SDLC; keeping our system stable for our customers and keeping our developers happy and productive. We effectively support the DevOps experience for the rest of engineering. - 1. Rational  2. Empathetic  3. Fearless  Heap has a bias towards evidence-based decisions deeply in its DNA, and isn’t afraid to follow that evidence even when it means letting go of past investments that no longer make sense. - I was fed up with my commute and Heap already had a very strong remote-first culture when I joined. I’ve stayed for the rapid pace and continuous learning; I have never felt this productive in any prior job. - I have worked with some really high-caliber departments at previous jobs, but Heap is the first place I’ve ever worked where it feels like every department across the org is on top of their game. That makes a big difference in being able to focus on my own best as well.