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…
Something we often emphasize on our teams here at Wayfair is that ideas could and should come from everywhere. It is important that every individual, not just our business owners, product managers, and designers, are thinking about our work in the context of the overall the customer experience. When it…
As data scientists, we face a variety of problem types. One of our critical challenges is identifying the proper methodological approach to solve each problem. By doing this, we avoid force-fitting the wrong tool to solve a problem, and we avoid having to reformulate a question to fit a specific…
As Wayfair has grown and matured its software development and data center operations over the past decade, and particularly over the last five years, we have embraced the principle of providing maximum visibility into our processes and systems. The result is a very large logging and time series infrastructure built…
As Wayfair’s business has scaled, so too has the size of our engineering teams – not to mention the complexity of the software features we’re building. At the same time, moving quickly in the global tech landscape has never mattered more. As a modern tech company, one simply cannot afford…
The Wayfair iOS app aims to have complete feature-parity with our website. This means that we need to support a variety of screen sizes and orientations in ways that — at least from an iOS frameworks point-of-view — are “custom”. To be specific, we need to support three distinctly different…
At Wayfair, we’re keen to research, innovate, and invest in new technologies whenever the opportunity arises. There are obvious advantages to this approach for our iOS teams in particular: It allows us to keep up to date with current developments and be prepared for potential API updates. This is particularly…
The Supply Chain Engineering organization at Wayfair helps power, connect, and optimize differentiated shipping and delivery programs, consistently executes against customer promises, and maintains effective stewardship of the bottom line. We are responsible for every step in the supply chain from the moment you order a couch on our website,…
At the beginning of February, I attended one of ACM’s premier conferences, WSDM 2018 in Los Angeles. Apart from the Hollywood-style banquet dinner on a boat, I was looking forward to the opportunity to talk through ideas with some of the brightest minds in the world from both academia and…
Right now, Wayfair has about 86,000 rugs available for purchase. On the first page of our rug category page, however, we only have room for the top 48. You see even fewer if you don’t happen to scroll or swipe down. When it comes to our customer’s experience, what we…
Early in 2017, Wayfair made the decision to adopt React as our primary frontend framework of choice. Rather than cover the reasons why we chose React, more interestingly, we’d like to focus on some of the architecture challenges we faced during the conversion. When the project officially commenced in June…
