Adventure 2.0 - Building the Gilt Software Development Center in Dublin

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from the Gilt Groupe in NYC and they asked, if I would be interested in joining Gilt Groupe to build a software development center in Dublin. I went to NY and met some of the brightest engineers in the industry and was totally blown away by the enthusiasm and the commitment to build and run the best e-commerce shopping experience on the web.

And here I am today sitting in a room with the Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan announcing that Gilt is establishing its International HQ and a software development center in Dublin. And I can't tell you how exited I am about being part of that adventure.

Gilt is the number one flash sales site in the US. Within 3 years they went from 0 to more than USD 400M in revenue. Flash sales is outlet shopping over the internet and allows large designer brands to get the best possible deal on their excess stock. And it is frantic. Gilt has close to 5M members and sends 3M emails every day (within 15 mins) to notify its members about upcoming sales events. The next day at noon(est) the sale goes live and it is first-come first-served on all kinds of goods from a wide variety of designer brands. The discounts are from 20 to (sometimes) over 70 percent.

That presents a "small" technical challenge, because at noon within seconds the traffic on the website goes from decent to 5000 pages/sec. At peak time the site processes over USD 1M in revenue within 30 mins (every day). And it serves 99.7% of all pages, fully dynamic and personalized, within 100 ms at all times. And it cannot go down, meaning scalability, performance and availability are at the top of the requirements list. Fortunately Gilt employs only the brightest and the best.

Let me know, if you are interest to join us. I am hiring.