zgm's comments

Annex Risk | Backend + Data Engineer | Bay Area, Austin | Full-time

The cost of homeowners insurance, especially in natural catastrophe prone areas, has skyrocketed in recent years. Annex is solving this problem with better digital infrastructure for executing the transaction. Our platform enables insurance agents to quote and bind policies within 90 seconds vs. the current multi-day phone/email/fax-based transaction that is the status quo.

We grew 4x in 2025 and anticipate similar growth in 2026. We've done the above after deploying <$1.5m in funding. We have significant and growing momentum on both the insurance distribution and insurance capital sides of our business; our challenge now is scaling our engineering team to support that progress.

We're in that exciting early stage, where someone can contribute foundational new pieces to core parts of our platform.

More details at:

Data Engineer: https://wellfound.com/jobs/3509845-software-engineer-data-en...

Backend Engineer: https://wellfound.com/jobs/3060211-software-engineer-backend

Annex Risk | Backend + Data Engineer | Bay Area, Austin | Full-time

The cost of homeowners insurance, especially in natural catastrophe prone areas, has skyrocketed in recent years. Annex is solving this problem with better digital infrastructure for executing the transaction. Our platform enables insurance agents to quote and bind policies within 90 seconds vs. the current multi-day phone/email/fax-based transaction that is the status quo.

We grew 4x in 2025 and anticipate similar growth in 2026. We've done the above after deploying <$1.5m in funding. We have significant and growing momentum on both the insurance distribution and insurance capital sides of our business; our challenge now is scaling our engineering team to support that progress.

We're in that exciting early stage, where someone can contribute foundational new pieces to core parts of our platform.

More details at:

Data Engineer: https://wellfound.com/jobs/3509845-software-engineer-data-en...

Backend Engineer: https://wellfound.com/jobs/3060211-software-engineer-backend

Annex | Backend + Data Engineer | Bay Area, Austin | Full-time

The cost of homeowners insurance, especially in natural catastrophe prone areas, has skyrocketed in recent years. Annex is solving this problem with better digital infrastructure for executing the transaction. Our platform enables insurance agents to quote and bind policies within 90 seconds vs. the current multi-day phone/email/fax-based transaction that is the status quo.

We grew revenue 6x last year and should end 2025 having grown 3-4x. We've done the above after deploying <$1.5m in funding. We have significant and growing momentum on both the insurance distribution and insurance capital sides of our business; our challenge now is scaling our engineering team to support that progress.

We're in that exciting early stage, where someone can contribute foundational new pieces to core parts of our platform.

More details at:

Data Engineer: https://wellfound.com/jobs/3509845-software-engineer-data-en...

Backend Engineer: https://wellfound.com/jobs/3060211-software-engineer-backend

Annex Risk | Product Engineer | Bay Area | Full-time

The cost of homeowners insurance, especially in natural catastrophe heavy areas, has skyrocketed in recent years. Annex Risk is solving this problem with better digital infrastructure for executing the transaction. Our platform enables insurance agents to quote and bind policies within 90 seconds vs. the current multi-day phone/email/fax-based transaction that is the status quo.

We recently closed our seed round, are growing 30-100% month over month, and we're looking for a full-stack product engineer to be our first engineering hire. The ideal candidate has experience designing and shipping product features end-to-end in a fast-paced environment.

What will you get to build?

- Extensions to our core platform to integrate with additional carrier partners

- Improvements to our agent portal and API infrastructure

- A consumer portal to allow insureds to access their docs, make payments, and request policy changes

Our tech stack is primarily Scala (Finatra + Finagle!), Javascript (React + Retool), and Temporal.

If interested, email zach at annexrisk dot com

As a recent graduate, I cannot recommend Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete highly enough.

Pragmatic Programmer fills in the gaps you need to succeed as a professional programmer.

Code Complete is a field guide to managing software complexity.

+1. This book is a goldmine of good coding practices.

Same. I love the functionality SourceTree provides, but it frequently ends up eating all of my CPU (2.3 GHz Core i7) even for trivial operations.

I have recently tried Tower and it provides similar functionality without the performance issues.

We've recently adopted Spark SQL and our queries run 5 - 200x times faster than with Hive.

Our experience with Spark Streaming, on the other hand, has been mixed. Our streaming app runs stably most of the time (up to 4 days in some cases), but we still see the occasional failure, sometimes with no exception or stack trace indicating what failed.

Our goal is to have a 24/7 streaming service, and Spark has gotten us close to that. There are just a couple of unexplained errors standing in our way.

1. Start at the simplest subsystem, and work from there.

This is especially true when working with third-party, legacy, or undocumented code. In the absence of documentation, your only way forward is to read the source code[0]. Find the main() of the simplest/smallest module in the system, and begin tracing through the code. This could be with a debugger, print statements, or the search functionality in your editor/IDE (Find Usages and Go to Declaration in Intellij are lifesavers).

2. Don't be afraid to break things apart.

If the simplest module in the system is overwhelmingly complex, start commenting out parts of the code. Go until you have effectively reduced it to "Hello, World", if you have to. From there, you can gradually add features back.

3. Constantly test your assumptions.

Don't assume comments do what they say they do.

Don't assume that config flag produces the behavior the documentation claims it does.

Do take inventory of you assumptions whenever the behavior of the system contradicts your current understanding of how it works.

You should be able to back up any claims about the system with empirical evidence e.g. when I change A to B, X happens; if I change A to C, Y happens.

[0] http://blog.codinghorror.com/learn-to-read-the-source-luke/

TellApart - Burlingame, CA. New York City (Full-Time, Intern, Visa): Software Engineering

TellApart helps many of the world’s most successful retailers unlock the power of their customer data by applying the latest advances in cloud computing, predictive analytics, and machine learning. Our Customer Data Platform collects and analyzes massive amounts of data to power an integrated suite of marketing solutions that delivers personalized shopping experiences for 100s of millions of consumers in real time.

About Us:

- Profitable (http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/12/ad-tech-startup-tellapart-h...)

- Featured as one of Wealthfront’s Career Launching Companies for the 2nd year in a row (https://blog.wealthfront.com/107-career-launching-tech-compa...)

- Backed by Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures

- Small, but growing team

Tech Stack:

- Apache Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, Parquet, Cascading, MySQL, Voldemort, Memcached, Zookeeper

- AWS, Aurora, Mesos

- d3.js, Ember.js

Problems we solve:

- Scale our existing data pipeline to handle 10x the data to match our current growth trajectory. (We are currently one of AWS’ biggest customers and only have a 50 person engineering team)!

- Research, design, and launch dual-homed, distributed storage systems that allow single digit millisecond access times to satisfy the stringent 40ms request time real-time bidding constraints.

- Migrate our legacy identity system used for audience targeting and real time bidding, to a new identity system built with concepts taken from the Lambda architecture

- Make performance optimizations to our real time bidding service to bring 99.9th percentile latency to within 30ms

We're currently hiring for all engineering positions. Apply via our careers page (http://www.tellapart.com/careers/)

Interesting. I'll definitely look into these. Thanks!

There was a discussion on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489401) about bringing App Stores to servers. Would people use and/or pay for something like this?

Thanks, josho! I appreciate the concrete, actionable advice.

Thanks, dredmorbius! I'll definitely keep these in mind going forward.

As a new grad about to enter the workforce, I find this more than a little disconcerting. Do any experienced engineers have any advice on how to avoid this kind of mistreatment?

"One reason why one goes to college is to learn how to learn social acclimation around people wealthier than you are, because this is a useful skill in convincing them to give you things that you want."

This is probably one of the hardest (and most valuable) lessons I have learned in college. If you don't take the time to develop your social skills, life is going to kick you in the teeth. Repeatedly.

I don't actually have access to the Light Table source code. I'm actually just replacing the node-webkit libraries in Chris's release with ones compiled on Snow Leopard, so I don't think there would be much of an advantage to having it on GitHub.

I've outlined the steps here: http://blog.zachmichaelov.com/2013/04/light-table-on-os-x-10...

From what I can tell, everything's working as normal. Let me know if anything breaks though.

No problem. :)