According to PayScale’s annual Compensation Best Practices Report, in 2019, organizations rewarded high-performing employees with larger base pay increases than they had the year before. While those increases came with informal bonuses and career development opportunities, 2018 saw fewer promotions.
Director of Software Development Jesse White’s team works behind the scenes at PayScale to bring this kind of data to light. His growing team is currently updating insights from a salary survey that allows current employees, interviewees and researchers to explore compensation models based on certain roles.
To deploy and validate such products and services, White leverages tools like TeamCity and Octopus. While he and MediaAlpha Senior Software Engineer Randy Pensinger share the benefits of their tech stacks, they credit successful rollouts with collaboration and the support of their leadership.
“Management understands and affords everyone growth through both hard work and mistakes, so we can continually make high-impact changes to the MediaAlpha Exchange,” Pensinger said.
Original PayScale research covers but isn’t limited to business insights, education and training, and pay equity. Reports on the company site leverage big data to dive into topics surrounding the impact of job referrals, what employees really want out of professional development and gender pay gap coverage.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
We use C# and Node.js on the back end and React on the front end. The majority of our system is Kubernetes on AKS, Azure Web Apps or serverless functions. But we also have services hosted in AWS as virtual machines in our data center.
We leverage Redis for caching, Rabbit for queuing and everything from Microsoft SQL to Cosmos for storage. We love the combination of TeamCity and Octopus. It makes it easy for us to deploy and validate our products and services.
What’s the most interesting project you’re working on right now?
We have many interesting and challenging projects in the works. One of these projects is the research center on our website. We have a whole system that automatically generates pages based on the available data collected via the salary survey. We are making this system smarter by combining other data sets and automating manual work. The result is a larger and richer set of pages for job seekers and users planning their education.
Team culture is huge and it starts with hiring.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
Team culture is huge and it starts with hiring. This means we spend a good amount of time assessing values as part of our interview process. You don’t need to spend more than five minutes on the engineering floor to feel the impact. People aren’t glued to their monitors with headphones on. They’re at each other’s desks, collaborating on solutions to problems.
The MediaAlpha Exchange platform connects buyers and sellers of performance media to create a more efficient marketplace for both parties. It involves real-time bidding so that insurance advertisers can target high-intent consumers across brand and comparison search websites. Pensinger spends his days making sure the technology works properly and iterating on the current process.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
The tools we have created as part of the MediaAlpha Exchange are my favorite. Our architecture is as simple as possible. Not much of it excites me. The tech that shines is the tech we have built. I’m a fan of our reporting back end and UI, including the subtleties available when comparing date ranges.
What’s the most interesting project you’re working on right now?
Publisher and advertiser optimizations. Publishers and advertisers are usually looking to grow margin and volume. Building intelligent tools to assist both parties is a recurring objective. We recently iterated on the publisher tool, our “design auto-optimizer,” and we are currently iterating on some recommended “user-agent bid multipliers” for advertisers.
These optimization tools justify more traffic from publishers and more budget from advertisers, which creates an even richer economy within the MediaAlpha Exchange. Furthermore, they are mathematically compelling to work on.
Our team has a habit of delivering on fast release cycles.’’
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
Our team has a habit of delivering on fast release cycles. That said, delivering software is complicated and risky. Management understands and affords everyone growth through both hard work and mistakes, so we can continually make high-impact changes to the MediaAlpha Exchange.
