Belly digitally connects people with the businesses they love. Want to learn more about how engineering drives our business, read our blog or come to an event.
Belly is building the world’s best loyalty platform. We are revolutionizing the way people interact with their favorite businesses while strengthening the relationship between businesses and their customers.
As a technology company with a deep respect for product, we are passionate about crafting elegant solutions to real world problems. In the last 2.5 years, Belly has found a product/market fit in an industry that hasn’t seen innovation in more than 30 years. Through a monthly subscription, our loyalty platform is used by thousands of businesses across the nation. We install a customer-facing tablet in each store that enables millions of our members to connect and interact in dynamic new ways with the businesses they love.
Headquartered in Chicago, IL, Belly was founded in 2011 and has raised $33 million from Andreessen-Horowitz, NEA, 7-Eleven, Lightbank, DAG Ventures, Cisco and Silicon Valley Bank.
We have chosen a modern technology stack which supports our concerns around iteration, scalability, security and flexibility. We take a SOA approach to development and all our customer-facing products are built as applications on top of our platform.
Our Android and iPhone applications are both native and each has a 4.5 star app store rating. Leveraging close relationships, Belly was the only company to be launch partners with Apple Passbook, Google Wallet, and Samsung Wallet. We regularly participate in beta programs, new feature releases such as wallet and both apps have been featured several times in their respective stores. We care deeply about the nuances of each platform and are redefining what is possible with mobile applications. Over a million Belly members use our mobile apps.
Belly’s primary product is our in-store iPad application. This application is a native wrapper around an immersive single page JavaScript application which is remotely updated and customized from the platform. The app was immensely complicated to build, yet the code is maintainable, expressive and elegant. We often ship several changes to this application daily and test multiple versions simultaneously. This application is seen by millions of people each week.
Our web based products are first class client side applications, they are statically served and talk directly to our platform. Our business owner portal is a large Angular application which humanizes a suite of complicated tools and data, empowering our business owners to easily manage their program.
The Belly platform itself consists of many single concern RESTful web services written in Ruby around Napa (extended from Grape). Creation of many small services optimizes for rapid development, constrains potential failures, and enables highly scalable engineering practices.
Our infrastructure is highly performant, dynamic, automated and built around the opinions of our client-side and server-side applications.
We are building our company for the long term and take the craft of engineering scalable technology and processes seriously. Our values include iterative development, automated testing, peer reviews, collaboration and continued personal reflection and improvement.
Interested in working at Belly? Try one of our coding challenges below and send us an email, we’d love to hear from you.
We have a service oriented architecture and we take a standardized and opinionated approach to building back end services. All our small services are built on top of our framework (Napa) which has a generator to make it easier to get started.
Our most common user action is a check-in, build a simple service which allows a user to check-in at a business.
There is no right answer, and this task is deliberately open ended, but some things to keep in mind could be service security, the potential for customer abuse, monitoring, analytics or logging.
Napa is ever evolving, for bonus points feel free to submit improvements to the framework.
Your code and tests should be hosted on Github so we can review them together.
Build a simple application that consumes a public location based rest service (Foursquare, Yelp, etc.) to query a list of businesses near you. Your application should display and sort those businesses based on distance from the device’s current location. Use the provided Photoshop document when building the user interface for displaying those businesses.
Additionally the application should use a caching mechanism to store your queried data so it can still be displayed if the device cannot access the internet.
As a bonus objective, we would love to see you display queried locations on a mapview, and a some integration/unit tests around your code.
Feel free to use any open source project dependencies you are comfortable with. Your code should be hosted on GitHub.