Viator Reviews

This business is growing rapidly and there’s much opportunity for career development, as we’ve seen through a number of recent promotions. The Sydney office is the backbone of our engineering efforts, and played a significant role in the tremendous growth we’ve seen in the last year. It's worth noting Sydney is critical to the ‘greenfield’ project you point out, and one of the lead architects is based in this office. As you know, this project is our long-term investment to fundamentally transform how we operate both internally and externally. It’s exactly what will allow us to shed the legacy platforms you mention, accelerate our development speed and cadence, and provide suppliers with increasingly better, quicker ways to market their businesses through TripAdvisor. In addition to this project, there is a significant effort to enhance our post-purchase experience with a new platform that was designed by the team in Sydney with support from our other offices. The primary design and implementation work was led from Sydney. On methodologies, we’re continuously examining our approach to software development so that it strikes the right balance between a lightweight approach to encourage individual ownership, as well as the right structure to support the broader team effectively. The changes we’ve made to our organization have been incredibly effective and the results speak for themselves: we’re the fastest-growing part of TripAdvisor, we’re leading non-hotel revenue growth of 24% year-over-year, TripAdvisor-sourced Attractions bookings have more than doubled year-over-year, and we grew inventory by nearly 50% last year. Lastly, with regards to our review process, we introduced a new system this year following feedback from hundreds of team members across the company. Our new and improved system looks at both what an individual does, as well as how they do it. And because teamwork is such an important part of our business, we collect feedback from peers at various levels – far beyond just your manager. This new approach to reviews concluded in several team members getting recognized and promoted for their hard-work and contributions, including many engineers from the Sydney office. As a top technology company and the world’s largest travel site, we offer very competitive packages that are up to par with other players in the industry. If you’d like to discuss any of the above items or have any further feedback to share, I’m always happy to chat with you. Please feel free to reach out to me directly any time. Thanks, - Jon Swinghammer, VP Engineering