As an engineering-first company, Index Exchange has long invested in building talent and growing our technical teams. I was immediately drawn to Index’s commitment to fostering creativity and innovation across the engineering organisation.
I joined Index as the head of engineering in India in 2022 to grow our presence in the country. As a global company with customers around the world, it’s logical that we should have a global engineering team that can support both our ad exchange and our customers 24/7.
Thanks to India’s vast talent pool, we’ve established a strong team of engineers with niche skills. As we plan to continue growing and hiring this year, I wanted to share a bit about what it’s like to work on the Index engineering team in India.
Our global engineering vision
In one of the first conversations I had with our CTO, Ray Ghanbari, I was struck by his vision for one engineering team. This simple but strong foundational principle means that we’re building a single engineering organisation that cuts across geographical boundaries and works seamlessly across our platform rather than in silos.
“It’s amazing to see what one engineering team of, for example, 200 engineers can accomplish compared to 10 teams with 20 engineers.”
Ray Ghanbari, chief technology officer
Index Exchange
Our engineering team maintains a single cumulative backlog as we expand the capabilities of the Index platform. Although we have global reach, our team remains closely connected. Every engineer at Index knows and works with each other, regardless of where they’re based. Everyone has an opportunity to explore cutting-edge technology, contribute to and take ownership of the features we build, and see their work make a difference.
“What is great about working at Index Exchange is that any new ideas are appreciated and management encourages everyone to explore new tech to see how it can help us efficiently solve our scalable data problems. Indexers are quite supportive, open to suggestions, and take care of each other. If you are hungry to solve niche data problems, Index is the place for you.”
Brijesh Gautam, staff software engineer
Index Exchange
Challenges the Index engineering team in India is solving
The ad tech industry is constantly evolving, which introduces exciting new challenges for our technical team to solve.
Our exchange operates at very low latency—in the order of milliseconds—and high throughput. Today, our exchange processes in excess of 300 billion daily auctions. This high level of scale and speed presents complex problems to tackle.
Our global team is currently working on a broad range of projects, which include developing new backend services using Golang, data pipelines using Flink and Spark, machine learning models, a quality and delivery roadmap, and security initiatives, as well as managing the infrastructure across our owned-and-operated data centres.
Career growth and learning opportunities at Index
There are ample opportunities to learn and grow as an engineer at Index, which is no surprise given that one of our core values is “Learn it. Then teach it.”
Outside of the exposure to the Index platform (which in itself is a product of excellent engineering principles and also a great knowledge repository), we prioritise creating opportunities for engineers to grow their skill sets and advance in their careers. We encourage Indexers to share their expertise with others, so our employee knowledge base is continually expanding.
Our learning and development (L&D) team hosts leadership trainings throughout the year as well as a structured leadership development program, LEAD at Index. Engineers can also tune into the L&D Speaker Series, which invites guest speakers to share their expertise on a wide range of topics.
Engineers can enrol in a range of curated courses through Index University or access the full LinkedIn Learning catalog to learn more about the ad tech industry, expand their technical skills, or further develop their leadership and soft skills.
The Index culture
We have a very open and transparent culture at Index that nurtures our team’s sense of curiosity, innovation, and leadership. It’s a culture where everyone can feed their ambition. Our mission at Index is to accelerate the evolution of ad technology, and our engineering team thrives on building technology that disrupts the status quo.
In fact, our team eagerly awaits the annual Index Hackathon, which brings together engineers from across the company to flex their creative and technical skills and solve pressing technological issues facing our industry.
Forums like weekly company-wide town hall meetings, tech meetups, and leadership sessions help our team stay connected across the globe and keep a pulse on what’s going on in the business. Lastly, our community team brings Indexers together with various activities focused on well-being, giving back to our communities, and fun and games.
We’re continuing to grow the Index engineering team in India as we look to build on the capabilities of our recently launched exchange platform. If you’re up for tackling new challenges with a word-class technology team, we’d love to hear from you.
