I joined Zumper as part of the Kleiner Perkins Fellowship Class of 2019. Coming into the summer, I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was my first time working at a startup in San Francisco, and I was apprehensive but excited. This summer has been all I could have hoped for and more.

After the interview process, I was placed on the Mobile Team, but didn’t know whether I wanted to be a mobile engineer. I had mentioned in passing to my manager, Johnny, that I wanted to explore machine Learning and product management as well. 

I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but I was really impressed with how much everyone took my interests into account. Contrary to a lot of other internships, I never had an intern project. This meant that I wasn’t parked away working on some obscure part of the codebase. 

I was treated like a full-time engineer, and worked with the rest of the team, contributing to the regular cadence of two-week sprints. This helped me learn a lot more about working in the real world than I could have by working on a separate project.

Some things I got to work on:

Software Engineering

• Dark Theme: Zumper really cares about maintaining its reputation as the most innovative startup in the rental space. This means devoting engineering resources to adopting new technology, and on the mobile team this meant that we got to build Dark Theme for the iOS and Android apps, becoming the first rental startup to do so.
  
  I worked on adding Dark Theme support for a number of core screens, including the onboarding flow, location search, Zumper Select and Instant Apply features.
  
  
• APIs/Swift 5: Earlier this year, Apple released its first iteration of Swift 5. I worked on upgrading all the API calls and middleware on the Zumper and PadMapper codebases to Swift 5, helping reduce the application size and improve launch speed.
  
  I also built a testing framework for Zumper and PadMapper that covered around 80% of all API calls. This project increased our confidence in the functionality and will improve developer efficiency going forward.
  
• Credit History: Zumper isn’t just a platform for people to find apartments. We also provide tools to landlords to screen tenants and pay rent. I built a feature to handle rental applicants with thin or no credit history within the Zumper screening tool, which helped improve the experience for these users and reduced the number of customer support calls we receive.

Machine Learning

• Price Prediction: I got the chance to make improvements to Zumper’s price prediction model. I implemented monotonic constraints on this model, for which I had to refactor it to use XGBoost’s Core Python interface rather than the SKLearn interface it was using earlier. This helped increase the model’s generalizability to new data, and will help make it more accurate in the future.

Product Management

• Communication Tool: The product team was working on the next stage of communication tools that we provide on the platform, and was trying to assess various options.
  
  I did a comparative analysis of around 20 other marketplace platforms’ communication methods, and formulated a framework for assessing their effectiveness. I delved into technical details to consider feasibility for our engineering team to deliver each method, prioritized them and came up with recommendations on the route we should take.
  
  
• User Research: I conducted extensive user interviews with clients to understand their pain points, and documented and tagged insights from these interviews.
  
  
• Ideation: In addition, I worked on developing product ideas for innovative features we could build to leverage the latest technology in the worlds of machine learning, AR/VR, and native app development.

What I liked about Zumper

1. People care: Everyone here really cares about the product and takes ownership of their work, and this motivates me.
   
   
2. Everyone’s helpful: People at the company were super open to me asking questions and picking their brain. My mentor and manager were especially patient with me despite my constant questions, and always guided me in the right direction. Even people on different teams went out of their way to make sure I was learning and growing.
   
   For example, when I was doing product management and data science work, people from those teams would take time out of their schedules to sit down with me. They ensured that I never felt lost or overwhelmed despite taking on some high priority tasks.
   
   
3. Clear deliverables and prioritization: I always knew what I had to work on, why it was important to the quarter/long-term goals and which tasks I should prioritize based on urgency.
   
   
4. Accountability: I tried to keep my performance at a high level every sprint, and the team holds everyone accountable for delivering on promises. Even managers at Zumper are answerable to their team and are always transparent about their work.

Overall, I’m very grateful for everything Zumper has done for me. I leave with a lot of new  knowledge, new friends, and some great memories from the summer. This company is growing fast and is run really well, and I’m happy to have been a part of that.

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