Engineering @ Beat: A Sneak Peek
My onboarding journey into Beat’s engineering ecosystem.
Introduction
“Welcome to Beat”, a broad smile and a firm handshake later I kickstarted my journey with Beat. Headquartered in Greece, Beat was expanding its innovative engineering teams in Amsterdam around 2019, and… after applying in June and completing the interview process in almost 1.5 months, I made it!
After the initial team assignment, the very first memory I had is being assigned a buddy. Every new joiner gets a buddy who helps onboard the new employee and mentors him/her along the way.
Since it was a remote onboarding experience (due to Covid lockdown), my buddy helped me virtually to get to know the Beat Culture and ecosystem better. ‘There are no stupid questions’ was the motto of my onboarding experience at Beat!
What followed from September 2020 onwards, was a venture into a new philosophy that I believe I have blended with enough to call mine. And here’s a sneak peek:
Collaborative Autonomy
The Engineering team in Amsterdam currently consists of four core domains: Fraud, Pricing, Payments, and Platform; further, split into teams. I onboarded with one of the teams in the Pricing domain. My team is responsible for building the Dynamic Pricing component enabling us to balance the ride demand and supply of vehicles in the market, especially during peak hours. It consists of a Product Manager, an Engineering Manager, and 4 Backend Engineers. We are responsible for a few autonomous micro-services such as Pricing-Surge, Atlas, and Geofence Portal. The small non-hierarchical nature of the team and microservice architecture ensured a smooth and fast onboarding through the team dynamics and responsibilities.
Autonomy and Collaboration go hand in hand. While we independently manage and evolve these micro-services, we also work in close collaboration with Designers, Product Managers, and other stakeholders; brainstorming on architecture designs and gathering feedback on new developments.
Sprint planning is not an ultimatum bestowed via Product Managers but a collaborative consensus on what we wish to focus on individually and as a team. We regularly prioritize reasonable tech debt payoffs as part of this planning, which as an engineer always cheers me up.
An Ownership attitude
Getting warmed up with the codebase, minor code changes, and bug fixes later, in February 2021, I volunteered for my first major task which was the implementation of a pipeline for calculating the non-availability (NA) of rides in a small geographical area.
After initial ideation individually, we had a team-level brainstorming and worked through several iterations of an Architecture Design Review (ADR) documentation. We brainstormed on several options around implementation but finally decided upon an implementation based on the Golang stream processing library goka.
I worked on the end-to-end development of the pipeline, with several iterations of local testing, peer code reviews, and revisions. Of course, my buddy shadowed me through each step and provided crucial feedback. We also wrote extensive unit & integration tests, monitoring & alerting configurations around this critical business logic. Once the NA pipeline was ready for production, we deployed and did another round of testing on the production environment, before enabling it for live traffic.
At Beat we say “Own it and get it done”, this is one of our company’s core values. Thus, right through ideation, I was encouraged to take complete ownership of the project. Since the launch, I have worked on several modifications and maintenance changes for the NA pipeline.
My team currently owns the code, monitoring, and outage escalations for the same. Outage escalations are managed via an on-call schedule. We have a weekly rota, where one member from the domain is on-call and is responsible for handling any outages or alerts. He/she is the first point of contact for any escalations from outside the domain
Data & Experimentation go a long way
Beyond the day-to-day developments, something that I am excited to share is a milestone we recently achieved, a testament to the culture I have been talking about.
As of March 2022, some of us from the Amsterdam and Greece offices have joined forces and became a part of what we call the Jumpstart team responsible for setting up our first Latin American Tech Innovation and Engineering Hub.
Committed to developing seamless mobility by unlocking the true potential of cities and people’s lives, Beat keeps investing in innovation and technology. The Tech Innovation and Engineering Hub in LatAm will be focused on building, operating, and continuously updating the vast infrastructure and backend systems that power Beat’s most innovative projects such as Beat Tesla and Beat Zero services that feature all-electric cars.
It’s important to underline that the electric cars need to be regularly sent back to Beat Parking Lots for recharging, leading to a reduced Effective Vehicle Utilisation (EVU). To help with this, we thought to enable the vehicles to accept new rides towards the end of an ongoing one. We had a hypothesis that it would increase vehicle availability and passengers should see shorter ETAs leading to improved EVU.
We brainstormed the idea with the Product team and decided to A/B experiment with this feature to verify our hypothesis. At Beat, there is a strong culture of data-backed decision-making and experimentation. We have an in-house A/B experiment tool built to track key metrics around traffic and conversion patterns. This helps to receive quick feedback, make amends, and test aggressively.
Within two weeks, we were ready with a Proof of Concept setup for our experiment. Key metrics for the experiment:
Primary metric: Increased EVU
Secondary metric: Increased Request to Ride conversion
We then ran the experiment for two weeks to gather enough relevant data. Currently, our Data Analysis team is working on this data to verify if it had a positive impact on the KPIs.
Enjoy the ride
I am fortunate to work with an amazing group of people; people who take their responsibilities very seriously but definitely make the perfect crowd for the Friday evening chill-outs at the office. These get-togethers are a great ice-breaker for meeting peers from different teams, and sometimes different branches of Beat. At Beat, we want to bring out the best of the cities we operate in, and that starts with our people. We’re challenging ourselves to be our best versions, so we can create the best version of our product. That’s why we’re constantly growing our world-class teams across our Tech Innovation & Engineering Hubs, shaping the future of urban mobility.
If you found this article interesting and looking for new challenges in Product & Engineering, check out our open roles. Join us on the ride!
About the author
Nikhil Goel is a Senior Software Engineer and part of the Pricing domain at Beat. His key interests include reading about databases, distributed systems, and event-driven architecture design.
