Knowledge Base

You’ve Got Questions. We’ve Got Answers.

How do you ensure quality?

Our entire platform was built to execute tasks at scale, but with quality as the #1 goal. Here are some ways we’ve integrated quality.

First, any judgment (aka any task done through the Squad human task interfaces) is done by a known contractor that has passed a series of ‘Capability’ tests:

  1. Before starting out as a contractor on the Squad app, each applicant must pass our general skills test (about 1 out of 10 applicants pass this phase)
  2. Each accepted contractor has a profile and reputation in our system that relates back to every task they’ve ever done. We understand their skills, experience, education, task history, and quality scores. We then group contractors according to various skills.
  3. Each contractor demonstrates skills that are needed for a specific task (for example: Moderation skills). We only open up specific tasks to pools of contractors that are accepted in particular skill groups (for example: Moderation, American Culture, Calling Tasks, etc)
  4. Finally, each contractor must pass a Task Specific Training also known as a Qualifier. Once they demonstrate they know the rules and have passed sample tests, we allow them to access the task set.

Second, since all tasks are completed through our human task interfaces, Squad has the ability to measure and track all actions (clicks, time spent on actions, right and wrong answers, etc). As such, we are able to measure ‘Intent’ down to the tiniest detail. Here are some of the tools we employ to ensure quality.

  1. We leverage several QA techniques depending on cost and quality considerations including Sampling Maker Checker formats, Multiple Judgments, Gold Standard Data, and other QA techniques.
  2. Contractors only get paid for tasks that are correct, as validated by multiple types of Quality Assurance checks as mentioned in point 1. Also, we are able to measure timing. So for example, if a task should take an average person 8 seconds, if a contractor does it in 1 second, then we raise a flag in our system and ensure that that task is reviewed by our team. If any abuse is found, we remove that contractor from our system, they do not get paid, and the task is put back into the system. Fairness and accuracy at the heart of the system.

Finally, whenever possible we leverage artificial intelligence to accomplish work. Each time we do that, we receive a confidence score as an output. Every time the confidence score falls below an allowable threshold, we use human(s) to judge those results to ensure accuracy, and further retrain the system to improve accuracy the next time around. This is called using a Human-in-the-Loop. At the end it is the best balance of Humans + AI together to accomplish the highest quality output while still accounting for other success factors like cost, flexibility, and speed.

What are the fastest turnaround times (TAT) you can support?

We can support turnaround times as fast as 1 hour, depending on the complexity of the task.

How much of my process can you automate?

The short answer is, it depends.

The longer answer is, we have to deeply understand your workflow to identify areas that are suitable for automation. Some things make perfect sense to automate, some things do not make sense to automate. We have tools and systems to identify the exact value of automation and allocate our engineering resources appropriately.

Historically for certain clients we have been able to automate between 30% – 50% of tasks within 6 months to 1 year.  Again this is entirely dependent on the specific workflow. Please speak with our team to understand more around the capabilities and potential for automation.

 

 

What languages do you support?

We natively support English and Hindi. Through partnerships with translation software companies we can support and integrate virtually any language into our workflows. Please speak directly with our team about your specific use case to see if we can support your workflow.

Do you integrate with any other software?

Yes, by design our platform can plug into a wide array of external partners and software systems. Please speak with our team to discuss any 3rd party integrations.

How do I integrate with Squad? Where is your API documentation?

Here is the link to our API documentation.

How much time does setup take?

This depends on the complexity of the integration and available resources. We’ve seen full end-to-end integrations go live in as fast as 1 week.

API Integrations are very straight forward. Here is our API Documentation.

Setting up the actual workflow and rulesets from our end can require 1-3 days for initial setup, assuming the guidelines are straightforward. We typically set this up during a proof of concept to demonstrate our capability, quality, and pricing.

What solutions and use cases does Squad support?

We support many solutions such as moderation, categorization, tagging and enrichment, calling, search tuning and recommendations, competitive benchmarking, and many others for a wide array of industries. For each solution we are able to entirely customize a workflow to suit your operations. To get a full view of the solutions we support please visit www.squadplatform.com/solutions

What industries do you work with?

We support industries including Internet Retailers, Marketplaces, Brands, Real Estate, and others. Our platform can also support use cases for many other industries including Finance, Healthcare, Insurance, and dozens of others. If your industry has highly repeatable operations we suggest speaking with our business development team to see if there may be an opportunity.

Where are your servers located and hosted?

All our code is hosted on AWS. The majority of our servers are located in the Singapore region along with some in the US (Oregon) region.

What is your platform uptime?

Our platform monthly uptime has consistently has been between 99% to 100% for the last 12 months. We guarantee an uptime of 99% on our API endpoints.

What is the approximate API Response time?

Existing average/median response time of our API endpoints is ~900 ms. API Response time is expected to reduce to <= 300 ms by the end of 2017.

How do you handle redundancy?

Most of our critical services are highly available with redundancies, load balancing, Multi A-Z deployments etc. e.g Our application servers are horizontally scaled coupled with AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). e.g. Our database storage supports availability across multiple zones in a region via AWS Relational Database Services (RDS).

We do daily backups of our database and take AMI Snapshots (Amazon Machine Images) snapshots of our application servers as emergency backups.

Have you ever had an outage and how did you respond to it?

Yes we have had a couple of outages in the past as described below:

Outage 1

  • Cause: Our RabbitMQ queueing service was down. This caused our API endpoints to fail.
  • Downtime: under 30 minutes.
  • Immediate action: A hot standby RabbitMQ service was spawned and all traffic was redirected onto the same.
  • Long term action: A Highly Available RabbitMQ service was deployed.

Outage 2

  • Cause: Our internal admin services misbehaved and choked client API endpoints.
  • Downtime: under 30 minutes.
  • Immediate action: Admin services were temporarily disabled and client APIs were brought up.
  • Long term action: Since both services were functioning on the same application servers we had single points of failure here. Admin services were isolated/de-coupled from client API servers to avoid such scenarios in the future. Our team gets alerted instantly in such scenarios and we have been to resolve such problems fairly quickly (under 30 mins) As highlighted above we follow-up such outages with a detailed post-mortem and put systems/checks in place to avoid them in the future
What happens in case there is a natural disaster?

Amazon Web Services has 14 data center regions around the world. Each region is located in a separate geographic area. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones (AZ). Amazon provides us the ability to place resources, such as instances, and data in multiple regions and multiple Availability Zones in a region.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
e.g. Region examples: US West Oregon (3), Northern California (3) US East Northern Virginia (5), Ohio (3) Canada Central (2) South America São Paulo (3) Europe Ireland (3), Frankfurt (2), London (2) Asia Pacific Singapore (2), Sydney (3), Tokyo (3), Seoul (2), Mumbai (2) China Beijing (2)

Our code is deployed in

  • Primary: Asia Pacific (Singapore): ap-southeast-1 which has two availability zones (AZ)
    • Availability Zone 1a: ap-southeast-1a
    • Availability Zone 1b: ap-southeast-1b
  • Backup/Snapshots: US West – Oregon
    • Availability Zone 1a: us-west-2a

Scenario 1: One availability zone in our region (Singapore currently) is affected:

  • Our services shall remain up in such a scenario. The performance of our services might take a very temporary hit due to the entire load being directed towards servers in a single availability zone but would recover rapidly with new instances being spawned in that region.

Scenario 2: All availability zones in our region (Singapore currently) are down due to the natural disaster:

  • We take backup snapshots across regions of our databases (RDS), AMIs etc. We keep backup scripts handy for a scenario like to this so that we can spawn infrastructure in a new region in case of a region level failure. We intend to add support for inter-region redundancy in future to avoid downtimes in such scenarios.

Scenario 3: Delhi is affected by a natural disaster:

  • AWS currently doesn’t have any physical region in Delhi nor do we have any code deployed in Delhi. AWS recently started a region in Mumbai though we do not have any code deployed in that region, so this wouldn’t impact any APIs/services. If a natural calamity happens in Delhi we would be working on getting people out of danger while the servers would be safely operating in Singapore.

Scenario 4: US West Oregon AWS Data Center or other regions (barring Singapore region) are affected by a natural disaster:

  • This could lead to loss of some backup snapshots but won’t impact any APIs/services
Where are your offices?

Currently our main offices are in San Francisco and India, with satellite offices in Los Angeles, Bangalore, and Gurgaon.

How big is the Squad team?

Our current head count is over 50 employees and we are growing extremely fast. Want to join us? Check out our Careers Page.

How is Squad’s team structured?

Our team is structured in five autonomous departments or ‘Squads’

  1. Platform Squad including engineering + data science
  2. Demand Squad including business development + marketing
  3. Corporate Squad including planning + finance + HR
  4. Supply & Delivery Squad including operations + customer success
  5. Research & Development Squad including Squad Voice + other R&D projects
Have you raised any money? Who are your investors?

We’ve raised $2.1 million in Series-A investment from incredible investors including:

  • Blume Ventures (part of the Draper Venture Network)
  • Abstract Ventures
  • Anthill Ventures
  • Gokul R, CTO, Square, 
  • Shamik Sharma, Ex CTO, Myntra
  • Amit Ranjan, Founder, Slideshare
  • Kris Gopalkrishnan, Founder, Infosys
  • Rajan Anandan, Managing Director Google Asia
  • and many other wonderful investors!
What are the perks of working for Squad?
  1. Working for one of the fast growing startups in a market that is expanding rapidly.
  2. Work for a ‘triple bottom line’ company that is giving back by providing access to meaningful work to otherwise disenfranchized workers.
  3. Free Meals!
  4. Ping pong
  5. Join a family that get’s shit done. We are over 50 employees now and nearly 50% of the team has run their own startup in the past.
I want to work for Squad! How can I learn more?

Check out our careers page to see all current openings. If you don’t see any role where you fit in but still want to work with us then please send us an email at careers@squadrun.co.

I want to be an intern at Squad! How do I apply?

We’re happy to hear that. You can send us an application at work@squadrun.co

I heard you guys are insanely good at ping pong, is that true?

Please come visit us to find out, we always love a good game of ping pong:)

I’m interested in writing an article about Squad, who should I contact?

Please contact press@squadrun.co

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