Introducing GIPHY Engineering

July 21, 2017 by Randy Shepherd

Welcome to our new GIPHY Engineering blog! We’ll be using this platform to share stories from GIPHY’s technical teams – the folks who build, run and enhance all of our products, tools and infrastructure.

First up, lets talk through what we do. We power GIFs everywhere. Whenever you see a GIF (whether on a social network, chat app or your favorite website/app), it is highly likely that it’s coming to you via GIPHY. In fact, most developers first become aware of GIPHY this way – most notably, through our Slack integration. Almost every interview candidate we’ve talked to sites this example, and at a recent conference when I asked the audience if this was the case, the majority raised their hands. I like to refer to this as “the tip of the GIPHY iceberg”.

While this is a great example, we do so much more than just make your work day a bit more fun, and we’re excited to share these projects with you. Some of the GIPHY Engineering topics you’ll hear about are:

– Engineering our API and website to operate at scale
– Evolving our search engine to ensure relevance and allow for discovery of new content
– Delivering performant (and fun!) user experiences in the browser
– Leveraging machine and deep learning to better understand our media assets and search performance
– Transcoding, processing and generating GIFs and other short form media at scale
– Developing our suite of mobile applications, while pushing the boundaries of what mobile devices can do

I’ll stop there, but there is so much more to showcase and we’ll be using the blog to do just that. Our posts will come directly from our Engineers, giving you first-hand insight into how we accomplish the above, and much more. In the process of doing so I hope you will get a better sense of who our team is, what GIPHY Engineering is all about, and why we are so excited to share the behind-the-scenes view into the work that we do.

– Randy Shepherd, VP of Engineering