Engineering Back

Join the Flock!

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

Engineering Open House

Twitter’s engineering team is growing quickly. Two-thirds of our engineers were hired in the last 12 months. Those engineers joined us from cities and countries around the world and from companies of various sizes.

As part of our effort to find and hire great people to build great products and solve complicated problems, last Thursday we invited several dozen engineers to Twitter HQ for our first engineering open house. Presentations from @wfarner, @michibusch, @mracus and @esbie showcased the depth and range of the effort required to present twitter.com to the world. The topics covered some of these key areas for development:

  • Dynamic deployment and resource management with Mesos - @wfarner

    Using Mesos as a platform, we have built a private cloud system on which we hope to eventually run most, if not all, of our services. We expect this to simplify deployment and improve the reliability of our systems, while making more efficient use of our compute resources.

  • Real-time search at Twitter - @michibusch

    Since 2008, Twitter has made dramatic enhancements to our real-time search engine, scaling it from 200 QPS to 18,000 QPS. At the core of our infrastructure is Earlybird, a version of Lucene modified for real-time search. This work, combined with other key infrastructure components, led to our recent revamp of the search experience and will enable future innovation in real-time search.

  • The client-side architecture of #NewTwitter- @mracus and @esbie

    Client-side applications for desktop and mobile environments have access to a class of well-rounded tools and framework components that aren’t as yet widely available for the browser. Therefore, a fully in-browser app like #NewTwitter requires investment in solid architecture in order to remain clean and extensible as it grows. At Twitter, we’re constantly iterating on the in-house and open source JavaScript tools we use to address this need.

This was Twitter’s first engineering open house, but it certainly won’t be our last. We plan to hold these regularly - every couple months or so. In the meantime, if you’re interested in keeping up with our engineering team, you can follow @twittereng or check out our jobs page.

- Mike Abbott (@mabb0tt), VP Engineering