Houzzer Profile: Jichi Guo, Engineering
In his role, Jichi focuses on ensuring that the Houzz search functionality delivers the most relevant results to our community. Forever a student of the world, when he’s not at work, you’ll find Jichi out exploring new places and learning how to play new sports or musical instruments.
How did you hear about Houzz? I was looking to join a company where my work could help to shape the foundation of their technology from an early stage and was drawn to Houzz after reading an article about the company.
What does your work entail? My work helps to scale our search functionality to encompass a growing database of information as well as improve search results for our community. More specifically, I build the infrastructure for photo search, product search, user search, and many other key functionalities.
Why did you become a back-end engineer? As a back-end engineer, I have more direct control over the large scale software stacks that I build. That’s one of the reasons I like working at a startup, like Houzz. Additionally, I enjoy creating solutions at the back-end which serve the business, and are mathematically and scientifically challenging to solve.
What’s your favorite part of working at Houzz? It’s very self-directed, so the work is controlled by your own hand. You personally have ownership over projects that will make a big impact for the company. I’m also impressed by the culture. Coworkers are more like family than colleagues.
What project are you most proud of? I’m most proud of the search middle layer called ‘the search mixer’. We created it from scratch and it has become a key component for all verticals of Houzz search, from products to users to photos. This gives us the ability to solve both business-level consumer challenges and low-level mathematical problems in a way that is elegant and beautiful.
