Money Squad

spothero money squad

All squads at SpotHero are essential to our success, and the Money Squad is no exception. Our squad plays a crucial role in collecting payments from our customers and for the company’s success. We are a two-sided marketplace, where we collect payments from drivers and pay out to parking operators who own or manage parking facilities.

It would be a bit hard to run a company without collecting money from our drivers or without paying our suppliers. Our squad interfaces with multiple payment processing services to facilitate payments and process refunds for our drivers. Additionally, we support internal teams by providing APIs to power things such as the end user’s checkout experience. Supporting the checkout experience means supporting order and item functionality, which categorizes us as an e-commerce platform instead of just a reservation platform. We don’t stop there; we also work closely with our finance team to ensure they have the data they need to properly balance their books. 

Currently, our squad is composed of four backend engineers, one quality analyst, one product manager and one engineering manager. However, we are looking to grow the team by two additional people, so that we can accomplish all the exciting projects we want to do!

What are we solving now?

Our current focus is making the job of our finance team easier as we scale. This includes improving our consistency, and accuracy. As well as preparing for evolving regulations both in United States and Canada.

Some of these changes will require integrating with specialized industry software while others will likely require us changing our database models to better interface with the accounting software. In addition to making the work of finance easier, we are also interested in adding new functionality to support new product offerings.

How do we do it?

Currently, the code written and maintained by the Money Squad is part of SpotHero’s Python platform. The monolith utilizes frameworks such as Django and OpenTelemetry. A Postgres database powers the backend while gRPC and Kafka are used to tie different pieces of the system together. Once we have fully modularized the “Money” system i.e. decoupled it, we will look to extract it into its own service in Kotlin.

Who we are:

We are a Squad of seven people, growing to nine people and here is a little about each of us.

Adrian

Adrian Petras, Principal Backend Engineer

I am a software engineering science enthusiast who enjoys putting technology in the service of people. Here at SpotHero I have the opportunity to solve tangible problems and hopefully make someone’s day a little better. It makes me feel right at home.

As a former legal adviser, I leverage the lessons learned in the past to drive the architecture and implementation of products forward to fit modern business needs. Being part of the Money Squad challenges me to do just that: evolve our complex system in a way that will improve transparency in the operations, enable growth, and mature our engineering practice along the way. I couldn’t be more excited!

Cezar

Cezar Jenkins, Staff Backend Engineer

Hailing from the mountains of West Virginia, I have been working with computers since I was eight. Starting as the first full-time employee for SpotHero in 2013, I have worked for years on scaling SpotHero from a barely-known start up to what it is today. Many of the tools and systems I introduced and built are still used today. 

Mo

Mo Khaledi, Staff Backend Engineer

I cut my teeth on programming in 1991 starting with Pascal. Soon after, I fell in love with C and 8086 Assembly which accompanied me all the way to the WWW boom in my home country (1999)—I even wrote my first CGI that was used to reserve university courses in ANSI C. I, then, learned and used PHP for almost 2 decades even though I knew it was not my type. In late 2019 I met the glorious Go (lang) and I realized that It was the language that I had always dreamed of—alas after 11 years of its introduction. When I joined SpotHero in December 2021, I was given the opportunity to join the Money Squad (while learning yet another language: Python). So far, I’ve been trying to leverage my SE knowledge to simplify things as much as I can mostly through automation and breaking complex problems into smaller and more digestible ones.

Jasmine

Jasmine Slater, Senior Quality Analyst

Originally coming from an Anthropology and Forestry background, I previously worked as an Urban Forester in New York City. My position included analyzing urban spaces for the replacement of green spaces. More specifically, my role was to carefully analyze a given area based on my environmental assessment, determine optimal tree species for that given space, and to calculate canopy coverage for my assigned borough. While I saw this as enjoyable in the beginning, I soon found myself extremely bored. My weeks consisted of the same tasks each day, and I was rarely posed with challenges. At the time, I knew that I always enjoyed tech, based on an HTML course that I took ages ago, but I didn’t know what exact areas of tech I wanted to learn. I started with a react native course and didn’t really enjoy it (no offense to anyone lol). My now husband suggested that I try Java. Long story short, one YouTube video turned into 10, which turned into 50, which then turned to several Udemy courses. Over the years, I learned Android development, and worked as a freelance Android developer. While I do enjoy Android development, I became more passionate about QA. I enjoy every aspect of working to improve the quality of a given system. I enjoy automation, API testing, manual testing, documentation, and just diving into the software to understand the ins and outs. 

I previously worked at OpenSpace, a platform used for construction project management. There, I worked on the back end team where I was responsible for API testing, manual testing, LiDAR testing, mobile back end testing to ensure data quality, and automation. 

I joined SpotHero July of 2022, and I am excited to be working with an amazing team and company. Just in my short time at SpotHero, I have been invited to be a part of conversations, something that was not afforded to me at previous companies. I very much enjoy the ability to have a seat at the table, and to provide input to challenging problems. I believe in constantly learning and staying up to date on the latest trends, methodologies, etc. I love collaboration, and I am thrilled to be a part of the Money Squad!

Brief Snapshot of My Main Skill Sets: 

Java, Python, Selenium, Cypress, Espresso, SQL

Favorite QA Quote: 

“Never allow the same bug to bite you twice.” – Steve Maguire

Baker

Baker Baha, Senior Product Manager

My love for computers started at a super early age; I remember my teacher writing a letter to my parents recommending they buy me a desktop at home. Back then, computers weren’t popular and the Internet was limited. Accessing the Internet for the first time felt freeing; there is much to explore. As I grew older, my curiosity expanded further and led me to immigrate to Canada more than a decade ago to pursue a software engineering degree and eventually settle there. After freelancing for years and two attempts at building startups, I found my way into Product Management. It brings me joy to learn about and empower customers to thrive. My experience has been mainly in platform and payment products. Most recently, at a fintech startup called Wave, helping small business owners manage their finances. Outside work, I spent my time running long distances around Toronto, practicing Muay Thai, and creative writing. I also enjoy nature escapes whenever possible, currently learning how to snowboard and apply machine learning.

Shane

Shane Lathrop, Senior Engineering Manager

My family’s first computer was a RadioShack TRS-80 that used cassette tapes instead of floppy disks. I first started “programming” on this computer by copying BASIC code examples from magazines (probably BYTE or COMPUTE! but I can’t remember). Being exposed to computers at such a young age led to a love of computers that has never left me and resulted in majoring in computer science when I went to college.

Since graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, my career has spanned multiple industries. Excluding internships during college, my first professional coding was for Motorola where I wrote C code for some of the first 3G base stations.In addition, I helped build the software for the Verizon KRZR and RIZR (similar to but less successful than the original RAZR). After many years there, I decided to switch from C to Java and joined Firm58 working in the financial industry. My journey then took me to ShopRunner where I had the opportunity to learn Kotlin, which is currently my favorite language. I also made the switch from dedicated IC into management but have continued to participate in design conversations and contribute to the codebase.

In April of this year, I made the decision to join SpotHero. I made the decision partially because I was excited about the opportunity to work on a product that I use and love as a consumer. But, a much bigger reason for me joining SpotHero was the culture of the company and the technological opportunities. After 3 months I couldn’t be happier with my decision to join SpotHero. The culture of transparency, honesty, and balance between accountability and support has been exactly what I hoped it would be. The ability to influence the technical direction of the Money Squad and help lead the team in extracting microservices from the current monolith is a challenge I looked forward to facing.

Want to join this Squad?

We have two open roles within the Money Squad both Backend Engineers, who will be working in a Python/Django and in the future creating a Kotlin Service.

For these roles we are looking for someone is at least a Senior 1, Senior 2 or Staff engineer. So at least 5+ years experience as an engineer across a few different environments.

This is the job posting for both roles -> Senior Backend Engineer


,