Gilt Groupe

For a quick glimpse in to our world, check out our tech blog and visit our "About" page.

It’s the perfect time to join Gilt! With a team of more than 1,000 employees worldwide—including more than 160 technologists—and a stack based upon open-source, cutting-edge technologies, Gilt offers all the resources and public brand recognition of a large, pre-IPO company, but all the experimentation and opportunity of a start-up. From creating Webby Award-winning iOS apps, to developing a lightweight infrastructure scalable and flexible enough to support the latest technological advancements, we hold ourselves to the highest standards in everything we do. And we firmly believe that our success comes from empowering our technologists to innovate, experiment, make decisions, and deploy directly to production.

About Gilt

In spring 2007, New York City-based Internet entrepreneur Kevin Ryan recognized a market opportunity to start online flash sales in the United States and introduce consumers to a new, exciting ecommerce experience. He set out to build a core founding team, and brought on Michael Bryzek and Phong Nguyen as the technical masterminds. From the start they worked to create the fastest, most exciting shopping experience online, with unparalleled customer service. Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, long-time friends and devoted New York City designer sample sale shoppers, were next to join the team, bringing their personal passions for online shopping to the group. Together, this founding team of five created a new way for millions of consumers to shop curated styles, goods and services, all at insider prices.

Today Gilt continues to search the world for the most coveted brands and products, including fashion for women, men, and children; home decor; and unique activities in select cities and destinations. We believe that every day is an opportunity to inspire and be inspired. Gilt currently ships to 180 countries around the world, making the shopping experience even more convenient for international members.

About the Gilt Team

The Gilt tech team works on personalization, machine learning, data warehousing, adaptive design, and other exciting initiatives for an audience of millions of members. Around 130 people work from our New York City office, 30 from our rapidly growing Dublin and Limerick offices, 20 from our office in Japan, and a few remotely. Our ranks include front- and back-end software engineers, data scientists and data engineers, iOS and Android developers, machine learning specialists, product and program managers, and UX/UI designers. We’re proud to own a tech stack built upon open-source and cutting-edge technologies such as Play, Akka, Docker, PostgreSQL and Kafka!

Diversity is one of our strongest assets. More than 15 percent of our team, including several tech execs, are female. Our Dublin team includes technologists from 13 different nationalities, and English is the second language for the vast majority of them. Our NYC team is similarly diverse!

How Gilt Tech Works

• To get things done, we organize ourselves into cross-functional teams of 4-12 members who drive initiatives, make their own decisions and take ownership of end-to-end quality. Teams are empowered and trusted to present best practices and processes; others choose to participate.
• We strongly encourage Agile methodologies. Most teams have backlogs, stand-ups, sprints and retrospectives.
• We promote code stewardship: an ownership model by which teams own repositories of code and take responsibility to encourage, review and approve modifications made by other teams. To facilitate review, we use Gerrit.
• Teams release Minimum Viable Products early and often.
• We A/B test almost everything!
• We make substantial investments in automation and tools to enable this decentralization. We’re well on our way to achieving a fully automated system.
• We maintain a research and development center in Dublin that works very closely with our NY tech team to drive innovation as we scale.
• Michael Bryzek is one of our most vocal supporters of embracing new and open-source technologies like Docker and PostgreSQL—and still codes! Based in NYC, Michael sits with the engineering team and makes frequent visits to both our Dublin and Limerick offices.
• We promote interoffice communication and goal tracking through a combination of tools (including some of our own), meaningful peer reviews, monthly tech all-hands, weekly 5 @ 4 tech meetings and more.
• We support the open source community and host lots of talks, free tech courses, meetups and other public events. (Scala creator Martin Odersky spoke at our NYC office in May 2014!!
• We let anyone on the team post to our popular tech blog or submit an abstract to a conference (and for people who hate to write, we have a full-time writer/editor who helps people craft their copy!)
• We maintain close relationships with the entities who develop and promote the technologies we use. This enables us to create amazing opportunities for our technologists to give talks, establish connections, and make an impact in the tech community at large.

During the interview process, we hope to learn something from you: expertise about a new technology; insight into a trend; a novel approach to solving a problem—something we don’t know yet. What’s your potential? What can you bring that no one else can? What open source projects can you share with us? We can’t wait to hear from you!