Who We Are

The Babylist team is around 85, half of which works from our Oakland HQ.

Our team are A-players that punch above their weight. We get hard things done, work smart, and reflect and refine process. We also work at a sustainable pace -- in general we don’t work late or on weekends. We have high expectations for individuals on the team. But we all enjoy life and families outside of our work.

How We Work

Our engineering team uses our favorite parts of agile. We generally work in weekly sprints. Stories and design happen before the sprint starts. We have a kick-off meetings for all big projects, and sprint planning once a week to keep us on track. We generally work solo on projects, but with a lot of collaboration and code reviews. We believe in having a code base that lets us be efficient. Having readable code and meaningful test coverage let us move quicker over the long term.

We are all motivated by different things, but share a passion for making our users happy and making an impact on the business. Our developers are expected to take on some product and project management. They’re able to get on the phone with a user (or her grandmother) and help them with any problem they’re having. We love A/B testing and watching how users use what we build.

Our backend is a traditional Ruby on Rails app and we use Rspec as our testing library. Our database is MySQL and runs on a separate server from our application and we have a slave database for running backups and analytics queries. We also make heavy use of redis and memcache.

The frontend of our website is built with React/Redux, Sass and Bootstrap. We server render nearly all of our react apps (universal javascript), and care deeply about the speed of our front-end code. We use mocha, chai, and enzyme for js testing and build our js/css bundles using webpack.

How We Interview & Hire

Our interview process begins with an introduction call to help you learn more about the role, learn more about your interests, and help decide if Babylist is a mutual fit. If we move forward, we'll schedule one more phone/video call for a technical screen. The onsite interview can work around your schedule -- you will both interview and work alongside our developers and interview with our CEO. We prefer to move as quickly as possible through this process.

What We Do

At Babylist, we help expecting parents get exactly what they need for the arrival of their new baby.

We have a large and rapidly growing user base of passionate parents-to-be who are making important purchasing decisions for one of the biggest events in their lives. We help parents-to-be in a time that's both exciting and stressful.

Our core product is our universal baby registry. Currently 25% of first-time expecting families in the United States actually create a baby registry at Babylist.com.