WhitePages is on a mission, to hire the best and brightest for our engineering and business teams. Among some of our most successful hires, and most promising employees, are our recent graduates. Check them out, they're doing big things!

Koos Kleven



Hometown: Tacoma, WA
University attended during internship: University of Washington
University standing during internship: Masters program
Major: Computer Engineering
WhitePages team/mentor: Business Search/Ryan Forsyth
Project(s) and deliverable(s): Initially I was responsible for integrating Yelp reviews with our business listings. After that I worked on the shared work of my team.
Something you learned from your internship that you didn't learn in class: I learned about a lot of different technologies, skills, and methodologies in school, but my internship was where I became a true practitioner of what I had learned, extending it, and getting closer to mastering it.
What Koos most enjoyed about his internship: Really early on I released a large project that went out to production, visible to our huge audience, which also set a pattern that has been reused a number of times, since then.
Why others should intern at WhitePages: If you want to work on fun, real projects and be given trust and room to grow, this is your place.
Most fun or memorable moment from his internship experience:
1. Watching my first piece of code go live to the Web, and seeing that it caused no errors.
2. Upon hearing that my graduation request was accepted, having a party with my team and playing my first game of beer pong.
3. Hearing in a meeting that we should use the pattern set by my Yelp integration to do the next project.
What Koos has been up to since graduation: Upon graduating from the Master program at UW, Koos joined the Business Search team at WhitePages and continues to rock at both engineering and beer pong. Koos has also spoke on-campus at UW to Computer Science students about what he has learned by being in industry that you don't learn from academia.

Alyssa Harding



Hometown: Federal Way, WA
University: University of Washington
Major/year of graduation: Computer Engineering; Applied and Computational Mathematic Sciences/2009 Undergrad/2010 Masters
WhitePages team: People Search Engine
Initial project(s) and long-term deliverables of People Search Engine team: Query classification for the search engine - I get to drive a crucial step in processing search queries. I helped develop the algorithm for doing so using techniques that I learned about in school, and get to add to them to fit our needs.
What was important to Alyssa when considering her first job: The paramount issue for me was having a project that fit my interests. Unlike many other offers, the teams at WhitePages made sure they had a project that fit with my interests and let me talk with the team and check it out before joining. One reason I wanted to hurry back after graduation was so that I could work on the projects I helped plan as an intern! It fit well with my interests in math and natural language processing.
What Alyssa enjoys about working at WhitePages: I love having a company that is small enough that I can learn from the business people and ops people, as well as from the other engineers. But I also love that WhitePages is big enough that I have a variety of teams to work with and a variety of engineers to learn from. One part of school I thought I'd miss was learning, but everyone is encouraged to collaborate and develop themselves, whether it be through browsing tech talks or studying alogrithms or working on Project Euler problems together.
Why other new grads should consider WhitePages:
- Be part of an awesome team
- Use a plethora of new technologies
- See your impact on the bottom line of the company
- There are no clowns in the office

Blake Thomson



Hometown: West Seattle, WA
University: University of Washington
Major/year of graduation: Computer Engineering (emphasis in HCI)/2010
WhitePages team: Core Site
Initial project(s) and long-term deliverables of Core Site team: Hiya! UI implementation, redesigned SERP, new login system, SEO improvements.
What was important to Blake when considering his first job: I was convinced WP would be a good place to work because I was excited by the Agile development environment, with modern tools like Ruby and Rails. But what won me over was the people and the work-hard, play-hard culture.
What Blake enjoys about working at WhitePages: WP is a great place for me to dip my toes into a bunch of different pools, and have big impact with every project I work on. I have contributed to the design and implementation of several projects at several levels, all the way from visual design to data-model design, and everything in-between.
Why other new grads should consider WhitePages: For a new grad, WP is the perfect size company with the perfect combination of Engineering and Business talet to learn and grow as a new developer. An Agile workflow keeps you on your toes, while 20 million unique visitors per month gives every project you work on both visibility and relevance to real people.
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