Cloud Strides at MongoDB.local Auckland

Jake McInteer
August 17, 2023 | Updated: September 8, 2023

MongoDB.local Auckland was held earlier this week, and from the testimonies shared by our customers and partners to the announcements made by our global executives one thing is clear: there’s never been a greater need for strong cloud strategies to support data-driven businesses.

Kiwi companies of all sizes, whether serving the New Zealand market or reaching a global audience, are avid users of cloud services and leading technologies such as MongoDB. Recent commitments from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to build and run cloud regions in New Zealand will unlock a wide array of new use cases, especially when it comes to making it simpler to build and deploy cloud projects that need to meet growing data sovereignty requirements.

Photo of senior account executive Jake McInteer
Senior Account Executive Jake McInteer kicking off MongoDB.local Auckland

Speaking at the event, Ben Cefalo (VP of Product Management, MongoDB) further announced MongoDB’s intention to fully support each of the cloud providers’ regions on MongoDB Atlas. This will bring a local presence for MongoDB’s leading cloud database platform which is already being used widely around the world and in New Zealand. It’s a great example of MongoDB’s commitment to meet customers where they are, and our multi-cloud strategy to be available in as many regions around the world as possible.

MongoDB already counts a number of large enterprises as customers in New Zealand, as well as a growing number of public sector customers.

One data sovereignty-sensitive customer is planning to deploy a major system in Microsoft's NZ North cloud region once it opens (slated for next year by Microsoft).

They have been running development and test workloads out of Azure's New South Wales data centre, but are planning for Production go-live in New Zealand due to the sensitive nature of the data. MongoDB's advanced multi-cloud and multi-region features in Atlas have streamlined that department's development lifecycle and helped keep the project on track.

MongoDB has been increasing its capabilities dedicated to the public sector, and we are expecting more exciting projects in this space in the coming years. Having recently completed the IRAP assessment in Australia also brings the added safety net for regulated industries in New Zealand that MongoDB is built for security, resilience and compliance.

MongoDB’s New Zealand customer base also boasts some of New Zealand’s fastest-moving and best startups and is spread right across the country - with LuminPDF down south, Marsello in Wellington, and Figured in Auckland, just to name a few.

At the MongoDB.local Auckland event, there were also presentations from a number of customers such as Canva, Cloudize, and LuminPDF. Michael Pearson (Software Engineer from Canva) presented his team’s challenges and triumphs operating at a massive scale - supporting 110 million monthly active users who collaborate across more than 15 billion designs, a scale very few companies and platforms have reached globally. It’s a great example of how MongoDB Atlas supports businesses as they scale to a global audience.

Photo of Michael Pearson, software engineer from Canva, giving a talk at MongoDB.local Auckland
Michael Pearson, Software Engineer from Canva

We also heard from MongoDB partners such as Microsoft who presented their plans to open the New Zealand North Azure Cloud Region. This was a great example, alongside AWS and GCP’s commitments, of global tech platforms investing in the NZ Tech ecosystem - giant shoulders on which platforms like MongoDB Atlas can build upon.

I also particularly enjoyed Erich Kuba (Founder at Cloudize) presenting on his experience trying to scale a spam filtering business on a relational database technology. His business got so big that it broke his database and ultimately his business failed - it was a pertinent reminder of the criticality of the work software engineers do and the importance that our technology choices take on.

Overall MongoDB.local Auckland was an awesome event, showcasing the best of MongoDB and our community here in New Zealand - we can’t wait to see it back again next year.

Interested in going to a MongoDB.local event? See if one is coming to a city near you!

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Beyond Borders: How MongoDB’s Talent Sourcing Team Fuels Global Hiring

Our Talent Sourcing team is an integral part of MongoDB’s Talent Acquisition organization. Hear from Sunny Kathuria , Senior Manager of Sourcing, to learn more about his growing team and how team members have access to learning and development opportunities that are transforming their careers. About the Sourcing Team The Talent Sourcing team is centralized in India with global support capabilities and is divided into specialized sourcing groups by business units: Sales, Engineering & Product, Customer Engineering, and Corporate & Marketing. The team’s strategy enables sourcers to act as true business partners to recruiters and hiring managers. Overall, we work towards the goal of generating a steady candidate flow for current and future positions by identifying, engaging, and networking with relevant talent pools of candidates, ultimately reducing the time to and cost of hire. Along with sourcing talent, we have a group of Talent Sourcers who support open positions in India and engage with candidates over the phone, email, and LinkedIn InMail to prequalify them for recruiters. The Talent Sourcing team at MongoDB contributes to nearly 25% of the overall hiring that takes place globally. The success of the team can be attributed to each sourcers’ knowledge of the industry, their effective utilization of sourcing channels, and their strong collaboration with recruiters and hiring managers. Hear from some of our team members Himanshu Kalra, Senior Sourcer - Customer Engineering I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of MongoDB's Talent Sourcing team. Working across regions, collaborating with global stakeholders, and hiring for diverse roles have contributed to my growth and continuous learning. I started as a Sourcer for Customer Engineering in APAC and was promoted to Senior Sourcer covering North America and India. This expansion provided valuable insights into different markets and talent landscapes. MongoDB's exceptional work culture and values stand out in our Talent Sourcing team. We encourage idea sharing, seek support from colleagues, and have autonomy in implementing strategies. I'm proud of the milestones achieved and excited about the future. Mahima Saxena, Sourcer - Engineering & Product Since joining MongoDB as a Technical Sourcer, my journey has been exceptional. The culture of collaboration and continuous improvement is a standout aspect of working here. MongoDB provides the necessary tools, resources, and training for us to excel in our roles, along with ongoing professional development programs to enhance our sourcing skills and stay up-to-date with industry trends. I’ve also had the opportunity to attend an offsite where I met senior leadership and gained valuable insights into our future plans. These experiences have reinforced my trust in MongoDB for my career. I feel privileged to be part of an organization that values its employees, fosters professional and personal growth, and provides a platform for success. Melwin Dsouza, Sourcer - Corporate & Marketing What sets MongoDB apart is its unique work culture. The inclusive and supportive environment motivates me to bring my best to the table each day. I am grateful for the constant support provided by leadership, who have been instrumental in my growth and development. There is a consistent focus on recognising employees which further reinforces my sense of accomplishment and fuels my drive to excel. One aspect that truly stands out for me is MongoDB's remote working policy, which has been a boon for maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Syed Binish Jawaid, Senior Sourcer - Sales I’ve been captivated by MongoDB’s amazing culture and inclusive work environment that embraces diversity and inclusion. Ideas are encouraged, collaboration is valued, and collective achievements are celebrated, regardless of background or identity. I’m constantly amazed by the abundance of learning opportunities available here, which have allowed me to grow from a Sourcing Specialist to a Senior Sourcer. Shortly after joining, I had the privilege of being mentored by brilliant leaders and also became a mentor to new team members. This exposure not only facilitated my professional growth but also helped me become an expert in sourcing top sales talent across the globe. I’ve witnessed the genuine investment team members have in each other’s growth, which inspires and motivates me every day. Ankur Sharma, Sourcer - Sales Being part of the MongoDB Talent Sourcing team has been an incredibly exciting experience for me. I have the privilege of working alongside some of the brightest and most hardworking individuals with a diverse range of skills. One aspect that makes working at MongoDB truly unique is the opportunity to engage with various business units and global stakeholders, each with their own distinct cultures. This dynamic environment ensures that my learning curve is always steep and keeps me continuously challenged. I am proud to be a part of a company that fosters a top-notch culture where we not only work hard to deliver exceptional results, but we also celebrate our achievements and enjoy ourselves to the fullest. Garima Fulara, Senior Sourcer - Corporate & Marketing Since joining the team three years ago, each day has presented me with valuable learning opportunities and a platform for personal growth. Being a part of the Talent Sourcing team brings me immense pride, as my contributions are pivotal in driving the company’s growth by aligning the ideal professionals with the right positions. During my time at MongoDB, I’ve witnessed significant expansion in terms of employee numbers, new regions, business units, products, and more. Knowing that I’ve played a role in facilitating this growth fills me with a strong sense of accomplishment. How to succeed on the team We look for individuals with strong research skills, knowledge of LinkedIn Recruiter, and a drive to go above and beyond to find great candidates, especially for niche roles and geographies. If you are applying to be a tech sourcer, you need strong conceptual technical knowledge of topics such as MongoDB fundamentals, products, and competitors; databases; software development lifecycle (SDLC); web services and microservices; DevOps, DataOps, and TechOps; and distributed systems. Experience in sourcing from unconventional tools such as GitHub is highly desirable. Our interview process involves a live sourcing test followed by interviews with the hiring manager, department head, and stakeholders. For sourcing tests, we ask candidates to read a job description, prepare a boolean based on their understanding of the job requirements, and then run a search. Candidates are assessed on their approach and engagement with the interviewer throughout the conversation, more than the number and quality of search results. The rest of the interview rounds focus on culture, relationship-building skills, communication, and articulation. Overall, if you have attention to detail, great communication skills (sharing your observations and asking the right questions), are research-oriented and can be creative with boolean strings, we would love to network with you! Interested in pursuing a career on the Talent Sourcing team at MongoDB? We have several open roles and would love for you to transform your career with us!

August 16, 2023
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Building AI With MongoDB: Integrating Vector Search And Cohere to Build Frontier Enterprise Apps

Cohere is the leading enterprise AI platform, building large language models (LLMs) which help businesses unlock the potential of their data. Operating at the frontier of AI, Cohere’s models provide a more intuitive way for users to retrieve, summarize, and generate complex information. Cohere offers both text generation and embedding models to its customers. Enterprises running mission-critical AI workloads select Cohere because its models offer the best performance-cost tradeoff and can be deployed in production at scale. Cohere’s platform is cloud-agnostic. Their models are accessible through their own API as well as popular cloud managed services, and can be deployed on a virtual private cloud (VPC) or even on-prem to meet companies where their data is, offering the highest levels of flexibility and control. Cohere’s leading Embed 3 and Rerank 3 models can be used with MongoDB Atlas Vector Search to convert MongoDB data to vectors and build a state-of-the-art semantic search system. Search results also can be passed to Cohere’s Command R family of models for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with citations. Check out our AI resource page to learn more about building AI-powered apps with MongoDB. A new approach to vector embeddings It is in the realm of embedding where Cohere has made a host of recent advances. Described as “AI for language understanding,” Embed is Cohere’s leading text representation language model. Cohere offers both English and multilingual embedding models, and gives users the ability to specify the type of data they are computing an embedding for (e.g., search document, search query). The result is embeddings that improve the accuracy of search results for traditional enterprise search or retrieval-augmented generation. One challenge developers faced using Embed was that documents had to be passed one by one to the model endpoint, limiting throughput when dealing with larger data sets. To address that challenge and improve developer experience, Cohere has recently announced its new Embed Jobs endpoint . Now entire data sets can be passed in one operation to the model, and embedded outputs can be more easily ingested back into your storage systems. Additionally, with only a few lines of code, Rerank 3 can be added at the final stage of search systems to improve accuracy. It also works across 100+ languages and offers uniquely high accuracy on complex data such as JSON, code, and tabular structure. This is particularly useful for developers who rely on legacy dense retrieval systems. Demonstrating how developers can exploit this new endpoint, we have published the How to use Cohere embeddings and rerank modules with MongoDB Atlas tutorial . Readers will learn how to store, index, and search the embeddings from Cohere. They will also learn how to use the Cohere Rerank model to provide a powerful semantic boost to the quality of keyword and vector search results. Figure 1: Illustrating the embedding generation and search workflow shown in the tutorial Why MongoDB Atlas and Cohere? MongoDB Atlas provides a proven OLTP database handling high read and write throughput backed by transactional guarantees. Pairing these capabilities with Cohere’s batch embeddings is massively valuable to developers building sophisticated gen AI apps. Developers can be confident that Atlas Vector Search will handle high scale vector ingestion, making embeddings immediately available for accurate and reliable semantic search and RAG. Increasing the speed of experimentation, developers and data scientists can configure separate vector search indexes side by side to compare the performance of different parameters used in the creation of vector embeddings. In addition to batch embeddings, Atlas Triggers can also be used to embed new or updated source content in real time, as illustrated in the Cohere workflow shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: MongoDB Atlas Vector Search supports Cohere’s batch and real time workflows. (Image courtesy of Cohere) Supporting both batch and real-time embeddings from Cohere makes MongoDB Atlas well suited to highly dynamic gen AI-powered apps that need to be grounded in live, operational data. Developers can use MongoDB’s expressive query API to pre-filter query predicates against metadata, making it much faster to access and retrieve the more relevant vector embeddings. The unification and synchronization of source application data, metadata, and vector embeddings in a single platform, accessed by a single API, makes building gen AI apps faster, with lower cost and complexity. Those apps can be layered on top of the secure, resilient, and mature MongoDB Atlas developer data platform that is used today by over 45,000 customers spanning startups to enterprises and governments handling mission-critical workloads. What's next? To start your journey into gen AI and Atlas Vector Search, review our 10-minute Learning Byte . In the video, you’ll learn about use cases, benefits, and how to get started using Atlas Vector Search.

April 25, 2024