Juggling Scheduling Algorithms, Postgres Tooling, and Incident Response: a Glimpse Into Heap's Engineering Culture

Our engineering team met up in NYC and Canberra, Australia this past December. We had a great time finding out how tall each of us is in real life, sharing work and non-work related knowledge, playing board games, and doing a little sightseeing. To offer you a glimpse into our engineering culture and technical challenges, we decided to publish a few of the internal talks we gave during this meetup.

Juggling and Scheduling Algorithms

Matan’s talk is a great example of our Virtual-First culture at Heap. Matan did not attend the EPD offsite in NYC or Canberra, but he was still able to give a very dynamic talk that wowed all engineers watching, regardless of whether they were joining remotely or in person. It’s also a good example of how Heap supports a casual work atmosphere where there’s room to talk about non-work interests.

How We Handle Incidents at Heap

Howie’s talk is about how we handle incidents at Heap. It highlights our blameless and accessible incident culture. Deep knowledge of Heap systems is not a prerequisite to leading incidents. Instead, everyone is invited to go through our incident commander training and to lead incidents as a way of learning more about Heap systems.

Tasting the Data Soup: New Tools for Working with Heap Data

Matt’s talk is a nice example of some of the technical challenges we’re facing at Heap and the tools we’re building to help us meet those challenges. Heap ingests billions of events every day, and we work hard to make querying those events fast for our customers. Rcitus is an internal tool we built to help with optimizing Heap queries across those events.

Interested in learning more about Heap Engineering? Meet some of our team to get more of a feel for what it’s like to work at Heap.

P.S. We’re hiring! Check out open roles here.