Blog
[Series] How I Spend My Time – iOS Mobile Product Engineer
November 22, 2019
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Raza Padhani
Since joining DoorDash about a year and a half ago, I have been able to work on a number of teams as an iOS engineer such as Dasher, Drive, Geo-Intelligence, and Internationalization. I’ve built core flows for our delivery process, merchant specific features such as Catering Setup and Parking Stalls, and a number of required features for our launch in Australia. Across all of these teams and projects the product development cycle has been very similar.
Product development at DoorDash is fast paced. Mobile engineers get to work on different projects simultaneously and ship features each release. We work in sprints, which generally last two weeks, and within each of these sprints we scope future projects, work on current projects, and continue on with personal initiatives. I generally spend about 15% of my time collaborating with Design and Product on upcoming projects and estimating how long those projects will take to develop. What’s unique at DoorDash is that, from ideation to execution, I have the ability to shape products that our team builds, not just how they are technically implemented. About 70% of my time is spent actually developing these products. This consists of creating technical specifications, gathering feedback, developing, testing, and finally seeing the product through the release process to production. I spend the remaining 15% of time between building our talent pipeline by sourcing and interviewing, and personal initiatives such as learning, development, and growth. This year, I sharpened my SQL skills by taking classes offered by our Data Science team and helped plan our company-wide hackathons.
My excitement about work comes from owning a feature from start to finish while receiving feedback directly from our users. Our culture encourages engineers to spend time with Dashers, Merchants, and Consumers to really understand the challenges they face and then surface those challenges during our design reviews.
The impact doesn’t stop there! In addition to our iOS Dasher App, we also have an iOS Consumer app, both of which are in Swift with a rapidly decreasing count of Objective-C legacy files. We also have three Android apps, the Consumer app, the Dasher app, and the Merchant Tablet app, all of which are written in Kotlin.
I spend the majority of my time on product work, but there are additional opportunities for mobile development if I decide I want to try something else. First, we have iOS and Android Platform teams. These teams help standardize our approach to software releases, stability, monitoring, architecture, and feature implementation for all of our mobile apps. Additionally, more related to working on libraries and design focused, we have opportunities on our Design team. Design Technologists for iOS and Android develop the shared UI libraries and abstractions that all of our mobile developers use. They also build tools, processes, and prototypes that enable design and engineering to work efficiently & consistently to build high-quality products.
In addition to learning about how I spend my time as mobile product engineer, I hope I’ve added perspective into Mobile Engineering opportunities at DoorDash. If you’re interested, our team is certainly excited to review your application. I recommend thinking about why you’re applying to DoorDash and what you’re really excited about. We evaluate candidates holistically, both on technical capability and values such as teamwork, ownership, and execution. The team here is comprised of the most talented engineers I’ve had a chance to work with. Everyone is really passionate about the work we do here, and we look forward to meeting you!
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