Darwinbox Scales Up and Out with MongoDB

Tech startup Darwinbox has seen exponential growth since its first line of code was written in 2015. Today, the HR Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform handles all employee interactions from recruitment to retirement, is present in 116 countries, and has over 850 customers and more than 2.2 million daily users. What’s more, Darwinbox has been recognized as the number one human capital management (HCM) solution by Gartner and secured investor backing from such big-name players as Sequoia, TCB, Salesforce, and Lightspeed. "The journey," says Shailendra Gupta, Director of Engineering at Darwinbox – with zero understatement – "has been fantastic."

Shailendra and colleague, Brahma Prakash Chary Deegutla, Senior Director – Engineering, Product Development at Darwinbox presented at MongoDB.local Delhi where they shared more of that "fantastic journey" and how MongoDB fits into it.

On top of Darwinbox sits a robust framework that gives HR leaders a holistic view of employees and the organization. An AI-powered chatbot provides a single interface whereby employees can interact with the system. If someone wants to request leave, access travel policy documents, or submit expenses–whatever the HR representative needs –the chatbot can help meet it, 24/7.

With 2.2 million plus employees accessing the portal the volume of data generated is massive; over 250TB of data is in the system. While the pace at which Darwinbox is growing into different geographies leads to an even greater increase in data volumes and users, prompting this ambitious tech company to ask; "How do we address the data locality, and how do we address scaling?"

"The answer," says Brahma, "is MongoDB."

Given the multidimensional nature of the data and the scale at which it’s growing, Darwinbox needed, "A flexible schema, good scalability, robust security, and documents-based storage–and all this comes as a package with MongoDB Atlas."

"MongoDB, a document-search, document-based database, with capabilities for the aggregation framework, delivers amazing performance and it’s helping us provide near real-time insights to HR leaders."

Before MongoDB Atlas, provisioning and managing the instances had to be done by the Darwinbox team; setting up configurations, upgrades, monitoring, backups, and restorations were all done internally – consuming considerable time and human resources. "With MongoDB Atlas, all these problems are solved" says Shailendra, "The architecture is lean, the search facility is quick, the managed service is amazing."

And the flexibility afforded by MongoDB brings added value to a fast-growing and changing company. "MongoDB makes it very easy to adapt for any new changes or customizations," says Brahma.

"MongoDB has become an integral part of our infrastructure," he adds, "enabling us for our growth expansion and business operations."