WebHR
WebHR is Verge Inc's flagship product, and it is still my primary product today. After three years at Verge Systems, the company moved me to it in 2018 as one of its first engineers. Most modules were basic then. Since then it has grown to 30,000+ companies in 190+ countries and 1M+ employees served, and the architecture had to grow with it.
today
As Principal Software Engineer I'm responsible for WebHR's platform architecture, its AI, and the AWS infrastructure it shares with the other Verge products.
WebHR's AI agent is live for every customer. You type a request in plain text and it does the work for you, like running HR tasks or building a report in minutes.
AI by voice, 2018
My first big piece of work on WebHR was bringing AI into it through Amazon Alexa, and it officially launched in 2018. With the WebHR Alexa skill you could run everyday HR by voice. You could mark attendance, add leave, generate payroll and send payslips, or just ask who is on leave today. The AI agent we ship today follows the same idea, now with plain text.
attendance
Attendance was the first module I took on, and I did all of its engineering. Employees can mark attendance by mobile, biometric device, kiosk, Slack or voice.
monolith to services
As usage grew, one codebase could not carry the load. I built a gateway and our first service behind it, for attendance, the busiest part of the system. Attendance alone now holds billions of records. Then we moved more parts out one at a time, like notifications and third-party integrations, with queues for heavy traffic and caching for speed.
WebHR is a big system, so we move it step by step. The busiest parts already run as services, and the rest moves when it makes sense.
modules
Planned and built performance, recruitment, forms, expenses, HR letters and more, and revamped many of the existing modules along the way.
wellness, during COVID
A wellness module where employees reported their health status, including from smartwatches, so companies could see in real time who should work from home and who could come in.
stack
Company figures from web.hr. WebHR is a product of Verge Inc, built by many people. Opinions are my own.