Developing for the Future

Introduction

Jobs in the US’s (JIUS) product is a web application for job seekers and employers to find each other, with a focus on state and local job markets.

Approach

Jobs in the US approached us for a technical audit with two goals in mind: to understand the maintenance characteristics of their platform and obtain estimates for new feature work. As our engineers dug into the codebase, we quickly found complexities that exceeded the audit’s original scope: a combination of proprietary technologies and years of piecemeal database modeling that would not support JIUS’s plans for the future of their platform. Swaths of the codebase were even obfuscated due to licensing reasons, leaving us with little insight to their inner workings, let alone the ability to perform maintenance.
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Problem

We began our partnership with some difficult choices to make together. We laid out a variety of plans to remediate high-priority issues, ranging from high-level overhauls to targeted, incremental changes. Each plan came with tradeoffs and different risk factors. Together we decided to take a hybrid approach, gradually moving each of the 90+ unique job scrapers at the core of their business from obfuscated, proprietary PHP to maintainable, scalable Node.js services. Once that situation stabilized we would embark on the much greater investment in their platform: to re-architect it from the ground up on open source and cloud technologies that would speak to their long-term business goals.

JIUS came prepared with a comprehensive technical document of feature specifications that would feed into our digital product design process. They also quickly assigned a dedicated internal team to serve as product owners with high availability, often right at our office. Once our team parsed the technical document and were as familiar as we were going to be with the existing codebase, Big Room Technologies began architectural planning and UX design, a combination we’ve found to work very well in parallel. As the foundational design became clearer, the architectural team began working on data migrations and the new API while the UX & design team could begin working with JIUS to essentially plan three apps under one banner: the JIUS Admin interface, the JIUS Employer interface, and the Job Seeker interface.
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Solution

One of our great strengths at Big Room Technologies is the breadth of knowledge in each of our engineers, which enabled a small team to successfully reimagine and rebuild the entire JIUS platform without disrupting their day operations. In doing so we vastly improved user experiences for all three user roles, modernized their database design and search architecture, increased performance and uptime, and democratized the technical stack so that it was based on free and open source technologies relevant to today’s engineering talent.