While Expensify is known for its spend management superapp, some may be surprised to learn that the people behind Expensify operate with a relatively modest team of around ~135 individuals hailing from all corners of the globe. Even more surprising is that over 66% of staff have been with the company over 4 years, while 50% have worked at Expensify for over 6 years!
If you were trying to get shit done on your expense reports around 3:30am UTC on the morning of Friday 16th June, then you would have noticed we had a site outage. We want to share the details of our Incident Response, not just to enhance our own learnings and behaviors for next time, but to spread that knowledge with our community as well.
Since 2011, Expensify’s unique and autonomous work culture has made our company a model for remote work. Our commitment to providing employees with the freedom to manage their own schedules and workloads has resulted in a reputation for innovation, creativity, and collaboration.
Expensify has an unusual technology stack in many ways. For example, we don't use DNS internally — just configuration-managed /etc/hosts files — and it works great. Similarly, we only make limited use of AWS — instead hosting our own hardware for the web and database layer — and it works great. But most surprising of all is that we don't use MySQL or Postgres — instead using none other than SQLite — and it works great.
This month marks the sixth anniversary of Expensify. In May 2008, David Barrett got the idea of a world where expenses reports don't have to suck. With this idea in mind he rallied the troops and founded Expensify, and for six years we've been experimenting with countless ideas on how to make expense reports not suck.
Last month we announced Amex Corporate Card Reconciliation and received a huge enthusiastic response from our users. Due to the popularity of the feature and user demand, we have expanded Corporate Card Reconciliation to many more major banks.
As you might know, we're hiring the best programmers in the world. Sure, everyone says that. But my coders will beat up your coders, any day of the week. For example, Mich is barely 5 foot tall, but is a competitive fencer. Witold is a 6'3" former professional hockey player. Nate practices knife fighting for fun. And they're pretty decent programmers, too.
