I meet a lot of new people and talk Vinted to them. Over a few weeks I realized there are many things known to insiders, which can easily make an outsider raise their eyebrows. I thought I’ll share some of them with you, our readers.

Vinted runs 11 portals in 10 countries - Lithuania, Germany, France, USA, Poland, Czech Republic, Spain, United Kingdom, Austria and the Netherlands. We serve ~ 16 million users.

Everyone in Vinted top management - Justas Janauskas, Mantas Mikuckas and Thomas Plantenga - has an engineering background.

Vinted has a fully equipped professional kitchen in its Vilnius office where most of us have lunch every day. You can eat lunch with the CEO, ask our CFO about economic trends or learn why aggressive marketing works for us with our Head of Marketing pretty much any day.

Vinted has ~ 150 employees. Most of them reside in our headquarters in Vilnius, some in our offices in Berlin, Prague and Warsaw. Out of those 150, 30 belong to Vinted Engineering. This includes iOS, android, frontend, backend, system engineers, quality assurance and their leads. The only department which is bigger is our Community Support - about 60 specialists in total. Other roles in Vinted include analysts, designers, product owners, user researchers, communication and marketing specialists, finance and accounting folks, human resources and of course management.

Most of the data in Vinted is freely available to any employee through our internal system dubbed People. It’s easy for anyone to follow progress on any feature we release, on the financial situation of the company, or how many servers are we going to order next month.

Through People I asked people - what do they like about our company - here are some of the responses I got:

Yes, everyone at Vinted is treated the same way. And yes, we bring dogs to the office - why should we hoard all the fun and leave them out?

Let’s get a bit technical now

95% of our platform infrastructure resides in data centers in Vilnius. Currently, we use 184 physical servers in a redundant 3 data center setup housing:

• 23 for our data warehouse infrastructure - 3 for Kafka and a 20 node Hadoop cluster (600 terabytes of data) powering business insights and allowing our analysts to carefully measure success of every feature we release. We release almost everything under an a/b test;
• 33 ruby web application and cache servers, which are deployed hundreds of times per day;
• 46 servers dedicated to storing and serving images to our users. We’re in a middle of a migration - once we’re done, this will be cut in half;
• 16 node ElasticSearch cluster powering our Catalog and message search;
• 15 database servers running MySQL and replicas;
• 20 hosts for running various services (some of them… microservices);
• 7 for Redis setup which is powering our feed;
• 4 for load balancing with Nginx;
• 3 for running background jobs with Sidekiq;
• 17 for various internal tools (vpn, chef, monitoring, graphing, build, etc).

The rest of the infrastructure, which is not in Vilnius, is 26 servers for offsite backup and varying amount of DigitalOcean droplets to test our infrastructure which we manage via Chef. We get pdf invoices up to 50 pages from DigitalOcean.

It’s fun to compare the above writeup to this post written two years ago. Our user base grew more than twice, while our infrastructure size shrank. We like efficiency at Vinted.

Vinted’s mission is to make second-hand the first choice worldwide. This is only the beginning. We need your help.