---
title: "Senior Rails Developer & Team Lead"
author: "Jarrod Carlson"
company: "Springbot"
industry: "E-commerce marketing"
location: "Atlanta, GA"
period: "Jul 2014 – Oct 2015"
tech:
  - "Ruby on Rails"
  - "Heroku"
  - "PostgreSQL"
  - "MongoDB"
  - "Angular"
  - "Magento"
  - "Amazon Marketplace"
canonical: "https://builtbyjarrod.com/experience/springbot"
---

# Senior Rails Developer & Team Lead — Springbot

Jul 2014 – Oct 2015 · Atlanta, GA

> Privately held marketing automation software serving the e-commerce industry

**Summary:** My first formal lead role — hired and led the team that automatically listed Magento merchants' catalogs, tens of thousands of SKUs at a time, on the Amazon Marketplace, taking on far better-funded competitors from a seed-stage startup.

---

Springbot sold a Magento plugin that gave small e-commerce merchants — mostly
boutique retailers — marketing analytics, recommendations, and audience
segmentation: things like emailing every customer who'd previously purchased on
a weekday, automatically, every Tuesday. In 2014, Shopify was only just gaining
traction and self-hosted Magento ruled SMB e-commerce, which meant supporting a
long tail of Magento versions run by store owners of, let's say, varying
technical competency. When I joined, Springbot was 15–20 people on seed funding
working out of an incubator on Georgia Tech's campus; by the time I left it was
50+ people in a proper office serving several hundred customers.

## Listing on Amazon, automatically

The CTO tapped me to stand up a second engineering team, parallel to the core
product, for Springbot's biggest bet: automatically listing a merchant's Magento
product catalog on the Amazon Marketplace. Amazon had a rich API and a minefield
of undocumented rules — seller accounts needed special entitlements to list
certain categories or brands, and the reasons ran deep (counterfeit fraud was
rampant enough that Birkenstock famously pulled off Amazon entirely). Merchant
catalogs were their own adventure: one store could carry tens of thousands of
SKUs, organized in ways only their owner understood — is that a new SKU, or a
variation of an existing one? — all needing normalization to meet Amazon's
listing quality standards.

I architected the pipeline that pulled catalog data from our core system and
submitted it to Amazon, and made the tradeoffs that kept the project shippable —
like launching with a subset of product categories we knew carried few listing
restrictions, and surfacing every Amazon-side rejection to the store owner as a
plain knock-list to work through. The result punched far above its weight: very
large, very well-funded companies were attacking this same problem with very
expensive products, and our working beta was competing in that space at a
fraction of the time and cost.

## First time leading

This was my first formal lead role, and it started as a team of one. As the
project took shape I interviewed and hired the rest of the team — an
accomplished backend engineer, a UI/UX developer shared with the core team, and
a junior Rails engineer who needed real coaching — and ran our informal scrum.
Being a small shop meant nobody graded us on ceremony; I was lead engineer and
architect at once, and the job was keeping progress visible and the team
shipping.

## The stack, and a seed planted

We split storage by shape: PostgreSQL as the transactional store for highly
structured data — accounts, billing, email templates, campaigns — and MongoDB
as the schemaless home for product catalogs that varied wildly from customer to
customer. And everything we built ran on Heroku. This was my first real exposure
to it, and the beginning of a conviction — that infrastructure should be
somebody else's product — which carried through [Trineo](/experience/trineo.md)
and eventually shaped the
[platform I built at Cox Automotive](/experience/cox-automotive.md).

I left when my contact at [Manheim](/experience/manheim.md) reached out to ask if
I was looking. I told
him to make me an offer I couldn't refuse. He did.