In 2018, Wayfair decided to move to a hybrid cloud infrastructure to host our storefront. We landed on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as our infrastructure as a service provider, enabling our developer and infrastructure teams to move fast by providing a robust set of APIs and a highly flexible and…
Excitement buzzed in the virtual air — after multiple years of work, we were finally going live! As we ramped up our feature toggle, we were met with words no engineer wants to hear: “Your service isn’t performing fast enough. We need you to toggle off.” Our team quickly pivoted…
Before we start: despite my best efforts, this text contains many so-called male default terms, like leader, officer, or manager, which although they are generally believed to be gender-neutral, are considered by most men and sadly also the majority of women as male. I am therefore using pronouns when a…
Here at Wayfair Engineering, we’re aggressively migrating our monolithic systems into decoupled (independent) libraries and microservices. Decoupled libraries and services allow us to build faster and deploy more frequently, but they can create discoverability and software testing challenges. In this blog post, we’ll show you how we used Storybook to…
Search Technologies is a highly impactful team at Wayfair looking for experienced engineers. We build fast, reliable and powerful customer-facing search systems across all Wayfair platforms. Our infrastructure provides the most enjoyable browsing and shopping experience for our customers and partners. Search Technologies is very collaborative, as we partner with…
Taking on a new role can be an experience that is at once career-definingly thrilling, and a bit nerve-wracking. The inevitable questions of one’s own ability start to creep into mind — “I feel like I only just hit my stride in my last role! Why am I changing everything…
Envoy rate limits is a fairly complex system, built using multiple components. While there are many articles on the Internet explaining basic setup and how each component works, we weren’t able to find something that explains how each component works end-to-end in simple terms. That’s why we’ve created this blog…
Welcome again, Wayfair Engineering Enthusiasts, to our virtual fireside. Make yourself comfortable and settle in for the second installment of our Fireside Story series on Continuous Integration. If you haven’t had the pleasure, please read part one, a history of GitLab CI at Wayfair. This installment will feature GitLab CI’s…
Introduction Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is an emerging field within Machine Learning (ML). There has been considerable advances in the state of the art in recent years. Machine learning models often need to be audited for bias and unfairness. Effectively interpreting the decision of an algorithm is an integral part…
Goal At Wayfair, we want to predict the performance of new sorting algorithms before we launch them. Why? Sorting algorithms make money! Think about it: what’s the main difference between scrolling randomly through our ~18 million products versus actually finding the thing you want and buying it? A sort order……
Introduction Wayfair sells products in the USA (wayfair.com), Canada (wayfair.ca), UK (wayfair.co.uk), and Germany (wayfair.de), and works with manufacturers from several countries. Consequently, business is being conducted in many languages. When product data is submitted by our suppliers in a different language than the market where the product is sold,…
