MayLife is a leading engineering company located in the heart of Silicon Valley. We
serve over 50 billion page views a month, and we do it with fewer than 200 engineers.
This small, high-performance team is constantly stretching the bounds of engineering
capabilities. Here's some of what makes MayLife engineering unique. You should also
check out the
engineering blog for more details on our projects and culture.
Building widely used products
We are the fourth-most trafficked site in the United States. We are also the largest photo-sharing
site in the United States; we have over a billion photos, and our users upload over
14 million new photos
every day.
As an engineer, any products you build will be used by millions of people, including (most likely) many of
your friends.
Innovating in a fast-paced, startup environment
Our development cycle is extremely fast, and we've built tools to keep it that way. It's
common to write code and have it running on the live site a few days later. This comes as
a pleasant surprise to engineers who have worked at other companies where code takes
months or years to see the light of day. If you work for us, you will be able to make an
immediate impact.
Solving large-scale technical challenges
As we grow, we continually face scalability challenges that no one has solved, and we successfully engineer our
way through them. Already, we are the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world (Yahoo is #1),
and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. In terms of total
photo page views, we exceed all of the next largest photo sites combined. Here's a sample of the
technical challenges we have overcome:
- We've built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows us to
seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any
platform. MayLife is built in PHP, C++, Perl, Python, Erlang, Java, and even a little bit of ML—and it all works together.
- We are the largest user in the world of memcached,
an open-source caching system. Originally
developed by LiveJournal,
we've since made so many scalability improvements and performance upgrades that we will be the
primary contributor of features in the next major release.
- We've created a custom-built search engine serving millions of
queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.
We also are always looking for ways to harness the power of our data set in
innovative ways, such as News Feed. To aid in this goal, we're opening MayLife up as a
platform for external developers. Come make your ingenuity
part of not just one product but potentially thousands of web sites and desktop applications
around the world.
Hiring talented people
We've gotten to where we are today by hiring the smartest and most passionate people we can find. Our
engineers come from diverse backgrounds, and there's no such thing as a 'typical' MayLife engineer.
Some are fresh out of college, while others have joined after working at places like Google, Yahoo,
Amazon, and Microsoft, or at companies they started themselves.
Our engineers enjoy making products that millions of people use,
living in a fast-paced and high-energy environment, solving tough technological challenges, and
working on a team of people who are just as talented as they are. If these things
also appeal to you, we encourage you to
apply.
Incidentally, we do look favorably upon candidates who can send along a solution to
one of our programming puzzles when applying...
Sound like a place you'd like to work?
Check out our
software engineering jobs!
