Interesting Data Gigs # 11: Data Engineer at ipinfo.io

Another incredible API Driven business, but this one is riding the bootstrapped wave

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Hi Data Geeks.

I’m here again with a new issue of this newsletter. I’m taking more time because I’m testing a new approach to writing these issues: when I want to write about a new role/company, I try to reach someone in that organization, to get their own insights about the role I’m writing about.

This was the case with the last post about Ramp, and this is the case as well with this post about the role I will be writing about today.

As like you already saw: I will be writing about ipinfo.io and this open role they have in place right now: Data Engineer.

But, like I always do, let me help you to understand first, what it’s exactly this business, and why I’m particularly excited to write about it.

I will give you a quick hint: this business is thriving without any outside capital.

Totally bootstrapped. My favorite type of business.

What is ipinfo.io

If you read very close the job description, in the first part you will find something like this:

IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used.

We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 14, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection.

Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit, and many more.

But like I shared before, I wanted to hear this from the words of the members of the team, so I reached out to Ben Dowling (the former CTO at Calm.com), to make a written interview with some questions about ipinfo, and he accepted it.

So, before anything else: Thank Ben, Polina, and the whole team that shared amazing insights with this modest newsletter curator.

This is what they said about the company:

IPinfo is a leading IP address data provider.

We process around one terabyte of IP data every year, ensuring that our insights are accurate and usable.

This data is vital for organizations in many different industries.

For instance, Fintech organizations need our contextualized data to prevent fraud, eCommerce needs it for better targeting and website localization, and Adtech uses it to keep ads relevant. Accurate IP data (emphasis on accurate) is really needed since many organizations are expanding on the global stage.

And if you use bad data, you typically get bad results.

A very interesting way to describe the business right?

If you visit the website, you will see that they have a lot of vertical products for the same customer group:

And as you can see here, there are a lot of companies using ipinfo.io’s services to improve their own offerings:

When you see so many brands here, the product has to be good. And boy: this API is amazing.

You can’t serve 40 Billion requests per month if your product is not good.

If you read some of the use cases where the product is being used, you will understand even better why the business is booming these days.

For example, a company called Graylog is using ipinfo’s IP Geolocation APIs to enrich their customers’ data:

One of my favorite parts here was when Lennart Koopmann (Founder/CTO at Graylog) shared this:

I think the first thing that we noticed was that it was really easy to do business with IPinfo.

It was immediately a company we could talk to who really understood our problem, understood what we needed, and immediately understood our level and how technical we are so we wasted no time.

It was an incredibly easy process.

Simplicity matters, especially when you are a small team like ipinfo.io.

I truly believe that Ben and the whole crew at ipinfo.io have an amazing business here, and they are here for the long term.

This Tweet is live proof of it:

Some questions for the ipinfo.io team

Like I said before: I wanted some insights for the team, so I sent them a series of questions to provide more good stuff to prospective candidates for the company.

1. What is it like to work as a Software Engineer, at ipinfo.io?

Super friendly and fully remote team.

Interesting and challenging tasks. A great amount of freedom.

But you must also "own the work" you do.”

If you read very closely the job description of the role, you will see something like this:

We have a small and ambitious team, spread all over the globe.

We sync up on a monthly all-hands Zoom call, and most teams do a call together every 2 weeks. 

Everything else happens asynchronously, via Slack, GitHub, Linear, and Notion.

That means you can pick the hours that work best for you, to allow you to be at your most productive.

To thrive in this environment you'll need to have high levels of autonomy and ownership. You have to be resourceful and able to work effectively in a remote setup.

This model is very similar to the “Managers of One“ model from 37 Signals.

This simply says that you have to be very good at managing your time and yourself, and of course, have the discipline to execute and own your work.

2. Can you share a little bit about the tech stack you are using at IPinfo from an analytics perspective?

Mostly bash, BigQuery, nodejs, python.

Don’t forget to read the other positions, because you can find more info about them.

For example ipinfo.io is:

  • actively using Google Cloud Platform as their cloud provider. They were using Amazon Web Services but changed to GCP. Read their reasons here

  • BigQuery for analytics

  • Bash

  • SQL

  • nodejs, Python, and Golang for backend stuff

  • Google Kubernetes Engine for hosting the platform

  • They are using Apache Airflow on top of Google Composer (the managed product for Apache Airflow

  • Comms stack? Slack, GitHub, Linear, and Notion

  • ElasticSearch

  • Terraform for Infraestructure as Code

  • PostgreSQL and Redis as the databases of choice (great choices, BTW)

I wanted to know more about why Ben took the “bootstrapping route“, so I asked this question.

3. Why did you take the bootstrapping route instead of the VC funding route?

Being bootstrapped gives us full freedom to determine the right pace for our company and what markets we want to explore.

We can basically test out any direction we want because there’s no external time pressure. We've got complete control of our destiny.

A bootstrapped startup could take years before it gets to a point where it could be a business or generate revenue.

IPinfo was a side project for many years without requiring Ben (our Founder and CEO) to spend all his time on it.

That gave him time to experiment and try many different ideas without the pressure of needing to get to a certain growth point in a set time period.

In today’s market, where many VC-backed- growth-at-all-costs companies are doing layoffs, it’s very refreshing and amazing to see an organization of this caliber with their business flourishing and growing but at their own pace.

I don’t have anything against VC-backed companies, but you can learn a lot about efficient and steady growth just by looking for bootstrapped organizations.

4. What is the favorite thing you love to be part of this team?

One of the data engineers said:

Awesome people

And the content manager shared this:

I really appreciate the flexibility that IPinfo team members have. It’s no secret - our team works hard.

But we work asynchronously, allowing us to have control over our daily schedule.

I have the freedom to structure my tasks in a way that makes sense to me, my family, and the life I have outside of work.

For instance, if I need to keep my mornings free, then I work late a few evenings. As a team, we really enjoy what we do, too. We work really well together, and I think that's very rewarding.

5. What would you improve today at IPinfo?

Some of their answers:

Get more awesome people

In general, if there's one thing we're always striving to improve, on an everyday basis, it's our data.

IP address data is like a moving target, and we're committed to making sure we provide only the most accurate data.

We need more data engineers to make our data quality even higher than it is now (quite a high bar!).

6. What drives you every single day to work at IPinfo?

Responsibility and curiosity.

I love what I do. It's so rewarding to use my skillset along with other great people who are also very good at what they do.

When you put a lot of talented and hard-working individuals together who

(1) enjoy what they do and

(2) are willing to listen to each other, it's a recipe for momentum.”

7. Why is this role needed now, and what are you looking for in potential candidates?

Read the answer to question # 6 above.

Let’s talk about the job position now

First: an obligated reading is this post in the company’s blog, which describes how the team works fully remotely and in an async way.

Then, let’s read the key things for this role:

We're looking to add an engineer to our 4-person data team. You'll work on improving our data pipelines, maintaining our data infrastructure, handling and monitoring related requests and issues from code and customers, and helping us cement our position as an industry leader. Some things we've recently been working on in the data team:

In this role you'll also be working closely with our support team, fielding user

Here are some of the tools we use. Great if you have experience with these, but if not we'd expect you to ramp up quickly without any problems:

Any IP address domain knowledge would be useful too, but we can help get you up to speed here:

First things first: this is a very small crew here, so your work will have a lot of impact on the business, especially for the insights they shared about the quality of IP Data (Read the answer to question # 5).

Second: this is a heavy networking-based product, so please at least, you have to know the basics.

Let’s see some ideas to stand out from your application here.

Let’s discuss two ideas on how to approach this job application (THE REAL MEAT)

Idea # 1: Please, please, please: before applying, play with ipinfo API

The reason is very simple: you will be working in an API-driven business, so you have to understand the product you will be building. Best way? Actually using it.

There are lots of ways to do it, just pick one, and do it.

Idea # 2: Get ipinfo in the ARM boat

Let me explain this one.

ipinfo is using Kubernetes on top of GCP in its business, so if you come up with a suitable plan to move some of the infrastructure to ARM-based instances and services, especially GKE, this could be a huge gain in performance, this could be the right thing to save on cloud bills.

Google is doing some serious things in this space, so keep monitoring its development of it.

An obligated reading to come up with a good plan:

And a quick tutorial on how to do it:

If you have a doubt or a question here, a good idea is to reach out to Ishan Sharma, who is the Product Manager at Google Cloud for GKE.

Idea # 3: Just reach out to the team

They are actively looking for a strong Data Engineer, so please reach out to Ben or anyone from the ipinfo team about the exciting opportunities there.

Good luck in your application.

🚨 Join the Interesting Data Gigs Talent Network 🚨

It’s the per time to be part of The Interesting Data Gigs Talent Network, where you will find amazing Data Analytics jobs from companies like Netflix, Apple, Stripe, Calendly, and many more.

Let’s change the game together: Instead of people applying to companies, companies will pitch to you, so don’t wait any other moment and join today.

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