Wayfair Tech Blog
Filters
There are 289 results that match your search. 289 results
October 31, 2018
So, you graduated college, spent half a decade in a quantitative PhD program, maybe took a postdoctoral fellowship….and now what? You may want to stay the course and pursue a tenure track faculty position at a university–or, you may not. While the pressure to remain within the academy post PhD can at times feel overwhelming, if you’re in the latter group and are considering making the switch from academia to industry, know that you’re not alone.
October 25, 2018
Being a long distance runner has taught me a lot about being an engineering leader. I’ve spent the last 15 years running races of all distances, some of which were great, and others that we’ll just call “learning opportunities”. I’ve also spent those same 15 years honing my skills as an engineering leader, during a career filled with great wins and more than a few “learning opportunities” as well.
October 17, 2018
Uplift models seek to predict the incremental value attained in response to a treatment. For example, if we want to know the value of showing an advertisement to someone, typical response models will only tell us that a person is likely to purchase after being given an advertisement, though they may have been likely to purchase already. Uplift models will predict how much more likely they are to purchase after being shown the ad. The most scalable uplift modeling packages to date are theoretically rigorous, but, in practice, they can be prohibitively slow. We have written a Python package, pylift, that implements a transformative method wrapped around scikit-learn to allow for (1) quick implementation of uplift, (2) rigorous uplift evaluation, and (3) an extensible python-based framework for future uplift method implementations.
October 15, 2018
Search is critical to the customer experience at Wayfair. What we show on the first page of results is incredibly important for users. The graph below shows what many people might already know when it comes to browsing and search habits: The majority of customers rarely look beyond the products on the first page of search results.
October 8, 2018
The world of owning home furnishings is similar to owning clothes: Nobody wants to see someone else wearing the same dress. Wayfair has a zillion couches in many different colors, designs, and styles to choose from, and we expanded that reach even further when we created our Custom Upholstery Experience.
October 3, 2018
Moving a couch across multiple countries to land in your living room, a couple of days after placing an order, is a challenging business. The Transportation Engineering team at Wayfair, who look after the transportation portion of our logistics, knows this all too well. This capability has given us a significant competitive advantage and, in the process of building it out, we have inevitably accumulated a considerable amount of what is often referred to as technical debt. Internally, we call this latency work because it is work we must do to reduce the future latency of our engineering efforts.
September 20, 2018
Ever since Google pioneered the concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we’ve seen product reliability, accountability, and assorted innovation in this space skyrocket in importance and scope. At Wayfair, we’ve been working hard to evangelize contemporary solutions to tricky scalability scenarios, investing thoughtfully in cloud enablement and containerization.
September 4, 2018
This past summer, Wayfair welcomed 47 software engineering interns to its Boston headquarters. Traveling from 27 different universities across the United States, these interns were immersed in a summer internship that would challenge them to be critical thinkers, innovators, and collaborative team members as they partnered up with engineering teams to solve complex business problems.
August 13, 2018
Workplace diversity is not just an ethical issue. Teams that overcome diversity issues (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, experience) often achieve greater productivity than homogeneous teams. If you’re surrounded by people who are different from you, you will be constantly challenged to reexamine facts, think deeper, and explain better. In this way diversity can enhance creativity and boost team performance and technological innovation.