DataDome Joins the Ranks of Great Places to Work 2024!
A global meetup of 70+ experts from DataDome's engineering & product teams in December 2022 has driven significant impacts on our roadmap & value to customers.
Devon Walo
Talent Acquisition Manager
Servant-based leadership is the foundation of a sustainable workforce, as was exemplified when DataDome CTO Gilles Walbrou initiated a global meetup for all engineering and product teams, including 70+ expert BotBusters, in Paris in December 2022. Now, six months later, we reflect on the impact the product and engineering meetup had—both on our product, and on our people.
– Paul Scanlon, VP of Product at DataDome
Leaders set the tone with a practical review of 2022 results, highlighting DataDome’s significant headcount growth and the total scale of businesses and customers we protected in the year (for example, blocking 257 billion fraud attacks in 2022 alone). The recap was followed by key initiative planning for 2023.
Managers and individual contributors of threat research, engine, dashboard, site reliability engineering, integrations, security, and product teams led dedicated workshops and discussions. Areas of focus included specific topics like intent signals, global scalability, performance, back office tools, how to continue supporting our people to become more technically efficient in their jobs, etc. Once the overarching ideas were discussed, the focus consolidated.
The product and six engineering teams focus on implementing “incremental, evolutionary, and breakthrough recommendations,” as described by VP of Product Paul Scanlon. Here are three key features, updates, and innovations discussed at the meetup:
After DataDome publicly announced our launch of the first and only user-friendly, privacy compliant, and secure CAPTCHA in 2022—the team was thrilled to celebrate the accuracy of DataDome CAPTCHA (which blocks 80% more bots than other bot “challenges”) at the meetup!
DataDome’s behavioral detection ensures new bot techniques are identified in real time, responding to 100% of requests at a false positive rate of 0.01%. Thanks to the team of world-renowned experts, DataDome’s detection models constantly evolve and continue to beat industry standards for accuracy. Currently, our detection models process 5 trillion signals per day (including signals from the feedback loop with our CAPTCHA), all of which inform and improve our machine learning detection models continuously.
Our detection ability continues to mature. Shouldn’t visibility? Queue our real-time threat dashboard, providing DataDome customers with visibility to worldwide threats, while each attack happens. Our bot and fraud detection engine displays, in real time, the attack type, geographical distribution and origin, timeline of threat requests, URL attack frequency, and more.
The product management and engineering teams grew in 2022. Bringing the organization together not only stimulated considerable technical advances, but also sparked an immense sense of pride in the team and leadership as they experienced their growth in person. As Paul explains:
We are growing a world-class team, I’m simply thrilled with the talent we have on board. We’re doing more and more challenging projects with these talented people, all working toward a web free of fraud.
Guillaume Vauvert is a Software Engineer on DataDome’s engine team. He is based in Lyon, France, and travels to our Paris office once a month. For Guillaume, the global meetup proved the importance of cross-collaboration between the engine and product teams to develop and optimize an idea. He left the meetup with a concrete understanding of the other groups’ objectives, difficulties, solutions, tools, etc.
– Guillaume Vauvert, Software Engineer
Guillaume participated in two workshops, led by senior leaders and individual contributors, focused on the evolution of ideas in threat research and detection. The conversations served as a necessary knowledge transfer for teams to tackle certain challenges together. Guillaume concludes:
We all learned a lot in these workshops. This type of interaction and discussion was mandatory for us to broaden our ways of thinking.
Technical Product Manager Lorenzo Vayno helped lead one of the workshops. Focused on threat research and CAPTCHA topics, Lorenzo’s role helps define products and functionality. He helps ensure DataDome’s solutions are technically feasible, performant, and sustainable.
Lorenzo partners directly with engineers who concretely build the product. Thus, he stresses the importance of listening to the engineers, understanding their problems, and driving their choices to ensure the solution meets product requirements.
For context, some projects are inspired by market or customer needs, in which case product managers lead the evolution. Projects driven by technical needs (infrastructure, security, performance, etc.), on the other hand, are led by the engineering teams and supported by product management through knowledge of potential impact, cost analysis, value add, and future product opportunities.
– Lorenzo Vayno, Technical Product Manager
The meetup helped emphasize the fact that open discussions with the engineering team can lead to new ideas that can be transformed into product by the product team. The meeting showed that a top-down approach for “product needs” can be enriched by “bottom-up” ideas.
Not only did this event have significant technical impact, but a “human” impact as well, as colleagues who built virtual working relationships were able to meet in person for the first time! Lorenzo remembers the excitement he felt in anticipation of the global meetup. It confirmed his impressions of the DataDome team: passionate and skilled people who are happy and willing to share knowledge.
Everyone was attentive and caring, no matter the role or years of experience. Communication was always easy, open, and positive. The event was very well balanced.
Unsurprisingly, fraudsters worldwide are leveraging bots and getting better at acting like humans, looking like humans, and hiding within large groups of humans. We even see fraudsters using real humans to initiate traffic. Then, they hand off the shopping cart to automated threat systems that use stolen credentials to attack online businesses, once they think bot protection stops paying attention. Ultimately, we are seeing more and more fraud in real time.
On a yearly, quarterly, and monthly basis we sit down and evaluate our backlog, identify the most promising and critical aspects that will continue to help our customers and prioritize this work with the engineering teams. In simplest terms, we will continue to do more, faster.
– Paul Scanlon
If you are interested in joining DataDome in our mission to rid the web of fraudulent traffic, we encourage you to check out our open positions, or even submit your resume through a spontaneous application.
