Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews with engineering managers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought, conducted by guest host Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart.

Bhawna Singh had two mandates at Glassdoor when she started as senior vice president of engineering and CTO: open an office in San Francisco to access the region’s talent pool, and rebuild the search vertical for job results. Glassdoor is a job and recruiting site that offers services that allow people to see information such as company reviews, salary reviews, and benefits that a potential employer offers.

To improve the quality of search, the team had to set metrics that the team trusted. Performance challenges surfaced when the team focused its efforts on the tactical aspects of architecting the platform. The Glassdoor team had tuned the system for quality; building out the deployment infrastructure and adding machine learning models. The work made the system heavier and less performant.