Voxy

The ability to speak English in today's world opens many doors. Travel, new personal relationships, connecting to extended family, enjoying the ideas and art of other cultures. For many, understanding and using English is the key barrier to life transforming professional opportunities. It's impossible to argue the impact of learning a language, and yet most of the available products are built with antiquated technology and discredited pedagogical principles.

Voxy's mission is to make language learning software that actually works available to students around the globe. Our experienced engineering team builds software in concert with a team of pedagogical experts and product designers led by Dr. Katie Nielson. We collaborate with colleagues in other functional areas in the context of cross-functional teams working towards quarterly goals in the OKR framework pioneered by Intel and Google. We work in iterations following agile principles, heavily informed by lean and kanban philosophies. We use a number of 3rd party analytics system in addition to a robust internal application logging and aggregation framework that feeds a data pipeline starting in S3, feeding through a number of Elastic Map/reduce jobs into a redshift database where we perform analysis to help us understand user interactions and to analyze the efficacy of our product. We conduct original scientific research in computational linguistics and have numerous posters, papers and pending patents to show for it.

In addition to agile software development methodologies, we use modern languages (like python and javascript or coffeescript) and software frameworks like django, backbone+marionette, MEAN stack and more. Our software development practices are progressive and driven by the team retrospective process. Some examples of practices we have adopted in through this process are test automation, continuous integration, infrastructure automation and config management. Our team builds systems that are performant for customers around the world thanks to our combined experience building high profile sites and ongoing curiosity in best practices for client-server application architecture. We use Amazon Web Services extensively for our dev/stage/test/prod environments because it aligns with our pragmatic attitude towards complexity; when we need technology which is not core to our mission we always look for a hosted solution first, an open source solution second, rolling our own only as a last resort. The best way to eliminate technical debt is by leveraging all the time and energy which has been distilled into all the high quality free and open source software on the web.

There is a nice write-up on The Muse that can give you a closer look at our environment and culture:
https://www.themuse.com/companies/voxy/