How Lalamove runs its engineering team

This week in Tech in Asia Jobs shares insights into how successful companies operate, hire, and more.

The Lalamove team / Photo credit: Lalamove

Founded as EasyVan in 2013, Hong Kong-based Lalamove set out with a vision of making on-demand local deliveries faster and easier. In a little under five years, the logistics startup has raised $160 million, employs 1,500 employees worldwide, and has a presence in 100 cities.

With Lalamove rapidly expanding, I was interested to find out how the engineering team keeps up. I spoke to Lalamove’s tech team lead, Chen Sun.

Lalamove’s engineering team

Chen (far right) pictured with some of the company’s engineers / Photo credit: Lalamove

The engineering team at Lalamove comprises six separate teams: three feature teams, two system optimization teams, and one infrastructure team.

The feature teams work on the universal app, the driver app, and the web app. The system optimization teams improve the backend and foundation of the system, while the infrastructure team handles system stability to prevent crashes.

Engineers rotate teams every few months so work remains fresh.

Team structure

The engineering team at Lalamove has about 35 people, with around three to eight people per sub-team. Each sub-team has a tech lead who provides leadership, mentorship, and guidance. The tech leads report to the company’s chief technology officer (CTO).

On top of having engineers, a product manager (PM) is attached to almost every engineering team. Product requests come from the PM, who is considered a member of the product team. All PMs at Lalamove have technical backgrounds.

Take Chen’s team, for instance. Chen leads the system optimization team at Lalamove. His team consists of six people, five of which – including Chen – are backend engineers. The sixth member is a quality assurance engineer. A PM is also attached to Chen’s team.

Here’s an example of what the team does.

Product development process

Challenges

Hiring