Keeping up with Wayfair’s blisteringly fast year over year growth is a blessing, and alas, also incredibly challenging. E-commerce companies naturally experience their busiest time during the holiday season, and our engineering teams are often thinking about the next holiday season as soon as the previous one ends. To…
Next week, Wayfair Data Science will be at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City. We’re bringing data scientists and engineers from several different teams, plus a VR rig to try out the shopping experience of the future (come find us at booth 224!). We pride…
Early in 2017, in the course of deciding to convert to React as our frontend framework, we realized we needed to render our React components on the server. We adapted Airbnb’s open source Hypernova renderer for our purposes. In particular, we implemented custom module resolution and modified the Hypernova module…
Wayfair has over nine million unique items in its catalog, and tens of thousands of new ones are added every day. These products come from 8,000 different suppliers who sometimes sell the exact same products — two completely unrelated suppliers could be buying the exact same area rug from a…
Last year, Wayfair launched Visual Search, a new and novel way to find products on our website. Users can now upload photos of furniture they like and find visually similar matches in an instant. If you need a little refresher on this technology, the original blog post can be found…
Earlier this month, the Pricing Algorithms team had a Community Service Hack Day here at our office, dedicating an afternoon to work on simple tools that could be used as part of any project. The day was an opportunity to fill any knowledge gaps in how our team overcomes common…
As an engineering leader, it can sometimes be a real struggle to make the work of your teams visible, especially in a problem space that doesn’t reside in traditional customer-facing areas. Without that visibility, it can be hard for team members to feel really great about what they’ve accomplished. To…
In April, I attended the Data Science Research Symposium at University of Massachusetts Amherst and gave a short talk highlighting Wayfair’s marketing data science projects. The full video and slides are below, but here’s an overview. Goals of marketing data science at Wayfair As the largest online retailer of furnishings…
Last month, the inaugural React Finland Conference was held on April 24–26 in Helsinki, Finland’s capital. It was the first ever React conference in Finland, and I was lucky enough to present a workshop there on component-driven development. Having React as a framework of choice at Wayfair, this was a…
At Wayfair, the data science teams collaborate with other partner teams to translate business problems into analytical frameworks, leverage data and machine learning to make robust predictions and recommendations, and build engineering architecture to scale up machine learning solutions. In a recent machine learning seminar at Northeastern University in Boston,…
Since I began my tenure at Wayfair as a data scientist, many PhD students and postdocs have reached out to ask for advice about the transition to data science in industry. After a fruitful collection of conversations, I’ve realized that there are popular misconceptions about what it means to be…
