Inside Buzzvil’s Engineering Culture

Hello, I'm James from Buzzvil's EX team.

Many candidates applying to Buzzvil are curious about our engineering culture as well as our organizational culture. To let you hear directly from Buzzvilians, we surveyed our engineers. We will keep sharing stories about our culture, technology stack, ways of working, and technical roadmap. Stay tuned!

First: talented engineering colleagues you can trust! 🤲

For an engineer at a startup, rapid growth may be the most important value. What makes that growth possible? Talented colleagues you can trust. Netflix has described maintaining high talent density as a competitive advantage. A study conducted at a research institute in Santa Monica, California, also found that the performance gap between strong developers and others ranged from tenfold to twentyfold. Talented people are both a source of growth and a competitive strength.

Growth and colleagues were also the words mentioned most often in Buzzvil's 2021 internal engineering survey. That is reinforced by the fact that the most important reason people gave for staying at Buzzvil was the people they work with, rather than financial compensation or benefits. Through a rigorous interview process, Buzzvil maintains high talent density and continually works to help engineers grow quickly.

“There are so many good engineers to work with that I feel there are plenty of opportunities to grow individually.”

“You can find good, capable engineers at any company, but it is hard to find this level of talent density.”

“Almost none of my fellow engineers are difficult to work with. We can grow together by having a positive influence on each other.”

Second: an environment with high-volume traffic and modern technology 📈

Many engineers care deeply about making an impact on other people. As a B2B platform, Buzzvil offers a different kind of appeal from a B2C service. Digital advertising generates enormous traffic from both advertisers and publishers. Building and managing systems that can process that traffic quickly provides a foundation for rapid engineering growth. Our active adoption of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Clean Architecture, along with effective infrastructure operations supported by reliable DevOps practices, is another attractive part of our engineering culture. Buzzvil began adopting Kubernetes two years ago, when it was still less familiar in Korea. Today, more than 95% of our services run on Kubernetes as we continue optimizing our infrastructure. There are always opportunities to introduce new technology!

“We can operate and improve an environment that handles high-volume traffic by combining different infrastructure technologies.”

“Our strengths include microservices architecture, active adoption of DDD and Clean Architecture, and modern technologies such as Kubernetes, AWS, Go, and Python.”

“There are few barriers to introducing new technologies, and we use so many modern stacks that there is an abundance to learn.”

Third: an autonomous, flat culture with a 4.3 Jobplanet rating! 👍

Alongside supporting engineers' growth, Buzzvil works to build a company-wide culture that makes it a good place to work. Rather than relying on instructions from above, we share the company's direction and context so that people can work autonomously and take responsibility. We also reflect on and improve our processes so that we can work rationally within a flat organization. Recently, we have been experimenting with organizational changes and ways of working to become more purpose-driven and help Buzzvil and Buzzvilians grow together.

“We have a flat, mutually respectful organizational culture and an engineering culture that aims for high productivity and quality.”

“The culture is flexible, without unnecessary paperwork or procedures.”

“It is flat and autonomous. We maintain a culture where growth is considered important.”

Building a better engineering culture! 🔥 #GrowingTogether

When this survey asked engineers how satisfied they were and how likely they were to recommend Buzzvil to a friend, 82.1% and 75%, respectively, gave scores of four or higher. The responses were positive overall, but some people were clearly not satisfied. Compared with major technology companies such as Google, we still have plenty to do. Respondents also raised issues we need to address, including technical debt that has accumulated as we have moved toward a more purpose-driven way of working. Even so, Buzzvil intends to keep reflecting, improving, and moving forward. If you want to grow rapidly as an engineer and help build a better engineering culture with us, please apply!

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