Inside our engineering team culture: Cloud-agnostic architecture, uptime, and communication

In this live Pinpoint session, “Developer access: Ask Smarty's engineers anything,” you get a front-row seat to an unfiltered Q&A with the people who build and maintain Smarty’s address verification and geocoding products. From handling “But Google Maps says this address exists…” to dealing with international formats, non-postal addresses, and rate limits, this panel shows how real-world engineering decisions are made at Smarty.
You’ll hear how the team thinks about engineering team culture and why keeping product, support, and engineering tightly aligned leads to faster fixes and better customer outcomes. The devs also share how they work across languages and time zones, and how strong cross-team communication helps them turn customer issues into same-day deployments instead of months-long backlog items.
The panel dives into Smarty’s cloud-agnostic architecture, explaining how they design for resilience, why they build many components in-house, and how multi-cloud deployment helps them stay online even when major providers stumble. You’ll also learn how the team avoided impact during a major AWS outage event—and what patterns they use so your address calls keep working when the internet has a bad day.
What you’ll learn:
Why Smarty’s address validation sometimes disagrees with Google Maps—and why that’s a feature, not a bug
How non-postal addresses and new-builds are handled in autocomplete and verification
How the team approaches rate limiting, performance, and high-volume use cases
Why engineering team culture and cross-team communication are treated as core infrastructure
How cloud agnostic architecture and multi-cloud deployment protect uptime during AWS outage impact events
Why soft skills for developers matter just as much as technical skills in building dependable location data products
If you care about reliable APIs, real-world resilience patterns, and what it’s actually like to work on mission-critical address and geocoding systems, this session is for you.

00:00 Intro
00:58 Getting to know the developers
02:45 How do you handle an invalid address that Google has validated?
05:14 How does Smarty deal with different languages?
07:25 Is everything that Smarty sells made in-house?
10:10 How do addresses work if they're not in the USPS database?
11:30 How to set an autocomplete to only include mailable addresses
13:07 What are some of the weirdest addresses you've encountered?
16:30 What are the most common mistakes made when setting up address verification?
22:50 Can you use Smarty to verify an address and then display it on a Google map?
25:13 How does Smarty handle rate limiting?
27:07 How does Smarty's culture impact their product development?

Resources:
Smarty's approach to building company culture: Putting the fun in functional
https://www.smarty.com/blog/building-...

The unique culture at Smarty™: Where innovation meets community
https://www.smarty.com/blog/inside-sm...

Career opportunities at Smarty
https://www.smarty.com/company/careers

Google address validation | What Google isn’t telling you
https://www.smarty.com/articles/does-...

Google vs. Smarty
https://www.smarty.com/google-address...

What to look for in an address data solution: Quality of support
https://www.smarty.com/blog/address-d...

What to look for in an address data solution: Address data needs
https://www.smarty.com/blog/address-d...