Tech & Innovation Blog
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Lifion, Innovation, Award
Jesse joined ADP just over a year ago, and his work on the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team for Lifion had already created an impact. He shared insights on how ADP is pursuing new technologies to benefit the world around us.
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Jesse W., the Senior Director System Reliability Management, recently won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award, honoring visionaries in tech space and making significant contributions to the world of tech.
Jesse helped created a Global Reliability Operating Model that gives developers clearer direction, more agency, and improved job satisfaction while allowing them to deliver more innovative codes to customers faster and with fewer mistakes. His contribution to ADP represents a new culture of ownership-driven outcomes rooted in document-driven engineering, self-service onboarding, and human-centered designing.
Jesse focused on his team, “I want to give credits to the teams we work with. Without them, we would not be able to execute this larger strategy.” He worked with engineering leaders from product-minded approaches to backend engineering, connecting technology capabilities to business goals. Together, they build faster and safer software.
What are some fun facts about you?
I am an innovation leader, a prop plane pilot-in-training, and a vintage Japanese watch collector.
Could you tell us about the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team?
The EREL team is a platform engineering group that builds tools and infrastructure with a vision to help enable an outstanding developer experience at Lifion. It offers capabilities for feature teams to manage their security and develop their cloud-native infrastructure. My team works with them to provide self-service incident and change management.
A vital part of this success is the Global Reliability Operating Model (GROM), a holistic approach to building complex software in the cloud. GROM has allowed software teams to work autonomously, pushing collaboration to the max and minimizing complexity within Lifion’s systems. EREL is constantly building upon its systems, focused on feedback to understand what tools and pipelines can evolve to improve the user experience.
What words would you use to describe engineers at work?
Simplify, Innovate and Grow. EREL actively measures its impact based on real data available to them within the systems. Utilizing real-time data makes this possible and provides a creative space for all engineers at work.
Jesse (right) with his family
What advice do you have for those with a focus on innovation?
Separate the ideation and inspiration from the execution allows your leadership and individual contributors to devote their full intellectual capacity towards solving problems in the most innovative way.
Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible. Look out three, four, five, or even twenty steps ahead of what can be done right now, then figure out the north start you need and inspire your teams to meet the larger business goals.
Congratulations, Jesse and the EREL team!
Learn more about working at Lifion and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Tech & Innovation Blog
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
Engineering, Innovation, What We Do
Leo Meirelles first worked at ADP for more than six years as a lead technical analyst and senior software programmer. Then he left for stints at Google and The New York Times, where he had the opportunity to learn new environments, improve his knowledge, and refresh his tech stack—all benefits he brought with him when he returned to ADP in 2016. Below, Leo discusses the continuous integration and development (CI/CD) process he implemented with his team and the company-wide plans for adopting it.
As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
By Leo Meirelles, Principal Software Engineer and Principal Architect
As a principal software engineer and principal architect at ADP, I work on multiple projects and provide support as needed. Since ADP has a lot of products, one of our biggest challenges is streamlining our processes. Our engineers work on payroll systems, retirement services, and pension services, to name some, for both small and large companies—and that’s just in the United States. Each country we support has different portfolio options for companies that integrate ADP products. Since we continue to evolve our technology, we’re never short on opportunities.
I worked at ADP for close to seven years the first time. When I returned in 2016, I got involved with a great project to aggregate multi-country payroll; we integrated with in-country providers, with internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (a11y) support. I’d spent a few years at The New York Times and then eighteen months at Google, and I was excited to bring that skillset back to ADP. At ADP, I’d always liked the people I worked alongside, and with ADP’s pivot to a technology-first company, I knew I could have a real impact here. In particular, I had the opportunity to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), first with one group, then two, and now we’re looking at global implementation throughout the company.
CI/CD combines continuous integration and delivery practices, relying on automation to guarantee that code changes are efficient and that application deployments are reliable. With the project I was initially working on, we had teams in multiple countries and multiple time zones, and when you have such a large amount of people spread out like that, you need to stay efficient.
Before this project, to deploy in a QA environment, we needed a UI Development Lead and a Backend Development Lead to approve a deployment release request since they were the most likely to be aware of any issues that could hinder QA work. They had to give the green light and say, “Hey, this code is good to go.” But when you have 30 developers, things get more complicated since you have to merge multiple pull requests. On top of that, we have eight microservices in the backend and three micro frontends—the login, the old application, and the new application, because we’re migrating a few things toward a new Angular version. This level of complexity underscores why ADP needed a global, automated solution that can work for everyone—and why we started the CI/CD implementation via our GitOps project.
GitOps is an evolution of infrastructure as code, where you build the whole environment from a configuration/definition file, and it stays together with the application source code. Later, it can be run by machines and build new environments without human intervention. The idea of GitOps is to use tools that you already use every day, which makes things easier since you don’t have to add new tools to your stack or change how you get work done. Instead of emailing, messaging, or calling someone to say, “Hey, can you deploy that version for me?” now you do that using Bitbucket and make a pull request, make a commit, and merge your code. After that, everything else happens automatically behind the scenes, and you can skip trying to find people for approvals. Because both the infrastructure and your code go into Bitbucket—in fact, the whole process for a new release—we’re able to have a new deployment in 10 minutes for the local environment using GitOps once the code review is finished, approved, and merged. From that point onward, QA owns the release management for their environment; they control what goes into the environment without involving DevOps and managers, giving more autonomy for the team to manage releases.
We knew that having GitOps would make life easier for DevOps and allow them to focus on other things, like maintaining production and improving monitoring and availability. Also, engineers deserved to oversee their code. But we had to figure out the best way to introduce the new process. So, we started slowly to minimize disruptions with the current software development process and give people time to adjust to a new way of doing things.
We had to get developers over the fear of breaking something. Everybody wanted to be either first or last. If they were first, they wouldn’t have to merge their code, and if they were last, they could make sure everything was working before adding theirs. Until we got into a rhythm, it was a stressful time. But once the teams started adopting the new process, things changed dramatically in a positive way. Instead of making considerable changes in the last few days of a sprint, we slowly transitioned to making several small changes every day. And if something didn’t work, it was a straightforward process to revert changes. Since everything is on Bitbucket, we can see the previous versions, making the long-term management much easier.
I talk to team members often, and we’re in a sweet spot right now. What really helped adoption was implementing a process when everyone was ready and open to trying a new process. I prefer to lead by example rather than trying to force people to do something. But as time passed, we built trust when it became obvious the new system worked. Now people have the flexibility to start working in whatever time zone they’re in and look at our online chats to see what’s changed since they last looked. We even have a bot that judges the quality of a pull request. We have twenty to thirty deployments in our development environment every day, and no one even notices. And if we need to make a production fix, we can do it in 20 minutes using GitOps and our other automation tools.
I’m looking forward to the full adoption of GitOps globally. We have a lot of products on a lot of platforms, so that will take time. But there are a lot of exciting things happening right now at ADP. We’re an evolving tech company and developing a cohesive development engineering team. Since I’ve been back, I’ve seen the environment grow stronger. We communicate and share between teams, do a lot of cross-team collaboration, and help drive innovation and ideas through events like global hackathons. As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Roll Forward: How breakthrough products are redefining ADP as a tech innovator
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Future of Work
For ADP as a tech innovator, this is just the beginning of the journey.
Roll Forward: How breakthrough products are redefining ADP as a tech innovator
Roberto Masiero, SVP Innovation Labs
From my long tenure at ADP, I’ve learned that when a company gives you the latitude to move around—either within the technology space or from technology to business or sales—you get plenty of chances to reinvent yourself. And reinvention on the individual level influences the reinvention of the company as a whole, which I think we really see now with Roll™.
Roll™ is a mobile chatbot platform that uses AI and natural language processing technologies to anticipate users’ payroll needs intelligently. It’s the first-ever DIY payroll technology, and it’s so intuitive that our clients just download it and go; a lot of them never even talk to a customer service rep. But while we designed Roll™ to seem effortless, it’s the product of years of creative work with a unified team. The idea for Roll™ was to simplify payroll and HR using a novel UX and platform. I run the Innovation Labs at ADP, where we develop new products as quickly as possible. We’re a relatively small team, around 30 people from diverse backgrounds and with no hierarchy, allowing us to pull together tightly as a group. It’s important to me to have a flat organization because the moment you create hierarchies, you create ways to point fingers. In the way we work, everyone shares responsibility.
We came up with the product idea for Roll™ about four years ago when we were finishing up ADP Marketplace and wondering what to do next. At the time, most of our lab projects were satellite projects, adjacent offerings to our existing core services. I thought, “What if we reinvented the core?” We saw an opportunity to improve multiple facets of our payroll platform—the architecture, the design, the user experience. We had a chance to envision a whole new system.
We fixated on this idea of events—that everything done as an action within the system should be recorded as an event. In fact, we initially named the product “E” for “events.” For example, if you hire someone, pay someone, or terminate someone, we record each action as an event. This way, we know who did what, where they did it, what time of day, and from what device. All that information taken together feeds a machine learning engine where the system gets better the more it gets used. Instead of a system with a bunch of menus, forms, and reports, we imagined a vector of events where events cause other events. We basically built the software as a workflow.
But we didn’t stop there. We also wanted to transform the UI into something much simpler and more direct. People tend to design user experiences with a sense of engagement in mind, but that’s not what we needed here. We didn’t want people engaged; we wanted them to get the job done and exit the software. So with Roll™, the user goes straight to chat and tells the system what they need, and the software understands. If it’s to hire someone, change someone’s W-4, change a payroll schedule, the user asks, and the software guides them through the process using conversational UI.
We also built Roll™ to function 100% on mobile. We decided the UX would use a simple chronological timeline, similar to Facebook or Twitter. Clients love having one place to go to see their activity: “Yes, I ran payroll yesterday evening,” or, “Great, that new W-4 went through.” In addition to optimizing for mobile, we also wanted a strong desktop presence. We noticed our desktop users liked to grab info from the system and transfer it to Excel spreadsheets, so we decided to give them an Excel-like UX.
We finished Roll™ in July 2019 and got a pilot client in August. That fall, we presented the software to ADP’s executive leadership team. We got the feedback that we were sitting on something big that works for small to large corporations. But they encouraged us to focus on the smaller markets, those with one to ten employees. So we spent a couple of months designing an additional layer of software to cater to small businesses. In March 2020, we piloted Roll™ with about 50 smaller companies who all liked what we were offering, and then the executive committee told us to put Roll™ on the market and sell it as soon as possible. So we went from pilot program to full rollout in under a year, and today we’re getting dozens of new clients a day signing up for Roll.
A big part of what makes Roll™ stand out is integrating natural language processing with machine learning. We designed Roll™ to understand the mental model of our user’s meaning. We wanted the chatbot AI to talk the way people talk.
We brought in ADP’s business anthropologist, Martha Bird, and copywriters to advocate for the user, helping us to shape the Roll™ voice. We didn’t simply want AI to predict what our clients needed for payroll purposes––though that ability was definitely important. We wanted the voice of Roll™ to demonstrate human understanding. For example, Roll™ learned to respond more positively when addressing a new hire or giving someone a raise in pay, whereas it is more subdued when discussing termination. It’s that empathetic understanding that gives Roll™ an edge in human interaction.
On the backend, we decided that we didn’t want to run servers, or even containers, like Docker or Kubernetes. Instead, we made every event a function. The beauty of functions is that they only exist while that function is running. So our cost of running Roll™ is extremely low. Using cloud services and this idea of functions is another way Roll™ sets itself apart.
Of course, Roll™ didn’t come without its challenges during the development process. Fraud is something we have to consider whenever we engineer or develop a new product. But this is what I love about the Lab: We think of our challenges as opportunities to make our products better. How can we improve? How can we automate? How can we reduce the amount of burden on the system from someone trying to commit fraud? And when we meet a challenge, everyone jumps in to help. We either fail as a team, or we succeed as a team.
I’d say we’re succeeding right now, and the beautiful thing about Roll™ is that it’s always running. We change our models to pick up on new ways clients ask for things, and every new question pulls into Roll’s knowledge and experience. So the more clients we have, the better the software becomes. It’s an unprecedented level of automation.
A program like Roll™ can help further ADP’s digital transformation from merely a payroll company into a competitive tech company. What makes Roll™ exciting is that it almost creates its own category; it’s a technological solution no one else has. We can dominate this market and apply some of the same breakthroughs—machine learning, using functions—with other ADP products. For ADP as a tech innovator, this is just the beginning of the journey.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Women Engineer Magazine Top 50 Company.
Recognition, Awards, Women in STEM
ADP is thrilled to earn a place on this year’s 30th Annual “Top 50 Employers” in Woman Engineer Magazine for a second year in a row.
Readers of Woman Engineer Magazine chose top US companies they would most like to work for and/or whom they believe would provide a positive working environment for women engineers.
They chose ADP as one of the Top 50.
ADP is proud to build diverse teams that represent the diversity of our clients to drive innovation. At ADP, we focus on inclusion and reflect a diversity lens within our products.
Our focus on such programs as our partnership with Girls Who Code and our Women in Technology Leadership Mentoring Program has led to distinctions such as AnitaB.org naming ADP a 2020 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward women’s equity among companies with large technical workforces. We know that having a more diverse organization makes us stronger, and we are proud of supporting women in technology.
Our Global Product and Technology (GPT) organization stays close to industry benchmarks and has adopted measures to continue to drive progress. ADP also supports philanthropic organizations that nurture the career development of girls and women in the technology field, helping them fulfill their potential as future tech leaders.
Our technology leaders are committed to driving diversity, including recruiting and developing women technologists while providing opportunities for them to grow their careers.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
We strive to offer personal development opportunities through self-driven platforms, and our International Women’s Network and our Empower Committee focused on Women in STEM. Regardless of your role, we offer opportunities for women technologists. Meet Some of the Women of ADP DevOps and how they drive data-centric development.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
Visit us at tech.adp.com and learn more about what we do.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Meet Roberto! One of the brilliant ADP Machine Learning developers behind our new payroll app, Roll™ by ADP®
Machine Learning, Brazil Labs, Roll by ADP
We had a chance to catch up with Roberto at ADP’s Brazil Innovation Lab in Porto Alegre. He shares his career journey, why he chose ADP, what keeps him excited, and why it’s a great time to work in machine learning.
On February 25, 2021, ADP unveiled an exciting and groundbreaking new payroll app called Roll™ by ADP® to help small businesses run payroll anywhere, anytime, quickly, and compliantly with no experience needed. The app’s artificial intelligence-backed conversational interface allows users to complete payroll on their mobile phones in less than a minute simply by texting, “Run my payroll.” Full press release. Watch a quick video of the app.
We had a chance to catch up with Roberto, a Machine Learning developer and one of the brilliant minds at ADP’s Brazil Innovation Lab in Porto Alegre.
Congratulations to you and your team on the launch of Roll™ by ADP®! We’d love to learn a bit about you. How long you’ve been at ADP, what brought you here, and what do you do here?
Yeah, sure. I’m working with machine learning here and part of Brazil’s Innovation Lab. I’ve been with ADP for three and a half years, so I started in 2017. I worked previously at HP, you know, the printer company, right? In their research lab.
I came here to start building the chatbot—a product complete within itself. A system where we can leverage the intelligence to make life easier for people that are using it. I’ve used chatbots, and sometimes they can be painful. Our job is to take the pain away. During development, we closely followed what our clients saw in production and what they said. When they are happy, that made us happy. We tried to understand our pre-production clients, make sense of what we learned, and iterate improvements before he launched.
So, our team is global and is split between here, the US, and India. We have about 13 people in Porto Alegre, but only four are working on just machine learning. We have around 32 people in Roseland, New Jersey, and about 20 colleagues in India. Our job here is to take care of the chatbot and help customers when they have questions. It’s kind of like using Alexa or Siri. When users ask questions, the AI is doing other things while trying to reply.
We’re also trying to extract insights from what customers are doing. For example, when you hire someone, we get the information behind the scenes, and then we do some tricky calculations to assist. The bot checks on things like gender and pay equity and offers data-driven insights to the client. For instance, in this location, you should offer a higher salary.
Tell us a bit about your career journey.
Sure. It’s a little bit messy. I’m an electrical engineer and worked a little bit in the automotive industry. I started as a hardware engineer working for Johnson Controls on a project for Fiat. Then I moved to a semiconductor company as an engineer and spent some time there. After that, I decided to move into technical marketing.
From there, I decided to get a master’s degree in Technology Management. I’ve lived with my wife in Lausanne – Switzerland, for two years. That was the initial plan. Then I got a job at Texas Instruments in technical sales. We stayed three more years before moving back to Brazil in 2015 and getting a job with HP. That was a big shift. I went from technical sales to software engineer. I had a colleague there that was working on machine learning. I fell in love with it, and I studied more about it. Then I got this opportunity at ADP to work 100% on machine learning. That’s why I came here. We pay 1 in 6 people in the US. There’s a lot of data here and good stuff we can do with it. So, I’ve been here since 2017.
I’m 41, almost 42, now. I have a daughter (Gabriela), she’s one year old. She is definitely my biggest project!
What still excites you about working here?
The team still energizes me. Before the pandemic, I enjoyed working with people globally and meeting the US teams in person when we still could travel to New York. We are trying to build this culture of applying available technologies and bridge the gap between open source and what folks in academia are doing with practical, real-life applications in our product, Roll™ by ADP®. Using this outside perspective, we filter what makes sense into our products to mature our technology.
I think the dynamics and openness of the machine learning domain are really driving the market right now. There’s a lot available in open source, and it’s our job to be up to date on the latest developments. It’s an exciting time to be working in machine learning.
Tell us a little about your project.
We beta tested with clients for almost two years. Last year, we did many internal demos based on our work with a gourmet ice cream company recommended by our Business Anthropologist, Martha Bird. We expanded and started working with our Small Business Services group and built our client list to 70 before we launched in February.
As we scaled for our GA release, we matured the product using input from a small number of clients. ADP’s executive team was happy with the product, and yeah, we hope people like what they see. As I mentioned, I go into production logs every week and see what customers are saying. Sometimes you get some nice comments, which is lovely, right? People talking to the chatbot and just saying, “Thank you!” I love seeing that. Martha measured pre-release net promoter scores (NPS), and they were really good. But we will keep the ball rolling and bring new features to future releases.
If someone asked you why they should choose ADP over other tech companies, what would you say?
I can say one of the things comparing ADP with the other companies where I’ve worked, and maybe it’s just specific to our product or my leader, but something I value a lot is openness. When I worked at other companies, there were a lot of layers. I think people are pretty open here also in terms of technology choices. I know that engineers like to experiment and test to see if stuff works. We try to do that here, experiment with things.
We are shifting from a service company to a more technology-oriented company. Here in Brazil, we are trying not only to apply technology but also to share ideas across the company. 
We created a machine learning discussion group. There are about 12 of us. We discuss papers, review articles, create challenges to learn new skills. We sometimes do presentations, attend or present at conferences. Everything is online today, which makes it easier. We get to exchange ideas and nurture our learnings across teams. We’ve discussed starting to produce some technical articles, and I’m happy that we can use the tech.adp.com blog to share them in 2021. I wish I had more time to write, but I don’t have as much time with my little one.
We also did our first internal developers conference in 2020, and I presented Uncertainty in Deep Learning. It was an amazing experience, great to share, but also to get feedback.
When I mention that we do these things during interviews and other things we are trying to do, candidates like this. I know in some companies people work in silos, but you cannot do that here in Brazil. We share as much as we can here. The openness I mentioned, it’s important.
Above, you mentioned exploring open-source and academia. Are there any projects outside of ADP that excite you right now?
Great question. Yes, there’s an open-source project called Open Mined and a course I’m interested in related to privacy with machine learning. The program is called “The Private AI Series.” Facebook is one of the course sponsors. They have a framework behind the scenes that helps people take care of customer privacy. In case you are interested, here’s the link: https://courses.openmined.org/.
Our team also continues to study and review new technologies. We are following Harvard CS224W online for graph neural networks and Causal Inference (lots of interesting applications will come out of this domain for sure!). For neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), we follow a vibrant startup and open source community called Huggingface. (https://huggingface.co/).
One last question! If you could advise your younger self or someone starting their career, what would you say?
Be inquisitive. Study. Help others.
Thanks for your time, Roberto!
Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP Wins 2020 Breakthrough AI Award
Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science
Accessible Video Controls
Video: AI and machine learning to help our clients
[TEXT] Welcome to ADP DataCloud
[DESCRIPTION] In animation, a man speaks.
[TEXT] Hi, I’m Jack. I’m excited to share some of the recently launched DataCloud Features that are helping our clients navigate the Dynamic Workplace.
[DESCRIPTION] The word “Start” on a screen. Underneath it, the numbers 1 through 4. Jack touches number 1.
[TEXT] We’re helping Organizations Understand how their workforce has been impacted by Covid-19. How? Data Mashups. Data Mashups – Covid Workforce Impact. Data Mashup refreshes daily, displaying the # of Covid-19 cases documented by Johns Hopkins. This has helped organize and understand how their workforce has been impacted by Covid-19.
[DESCRIPTION] Jack presses 2.
[TEXT] We’ve identified Millions in tax credit opportunities for our clients. How? Say Hello to Storyboards. Storyboards – Employee Retention Tax Credit. Storyboards helps clients easily identify if they are eligible for Employee Retention Tax Credits. The platform will automatically calculate the tax credit opportunity based on eligible employees. E.R. T.C. has proactively surface to millions and tax credit opportunities for our clients.
[TEXT] 3. We are helping millions of Practitioners monitor employee sentiment about returning to the workplace. How? Meet Return to Work. Return to Work – Readiness Survey. Practitioners can now send short surveys to collect worker Readiness and sentiment about returning to the workplace. Surveys are delivered to workers through the easy-to-use a. D. P. Mobile app. Practitioners are monitoring employee sentiment about returning to the workplace.
[TEXT] 4. We’ve helped Practitioners Answer key questions about their organization. How? With Organizational Benchmarks. Benchmarks – Organizational Benchmarks. Clients can take a deep-dive into their organizational data and benchmark their company against peers. Uncover organizational questions like what percentage of labor cost do my peers spend on sales and marketing. Discover how their head count breakdown compares to their industry. ADP DataCloud, Learn, Get Inspired, Join the Conversation
Congratulations to our DataCloud team! Recognized for its impressive capabilities and significant value it brings to businesses, ADP’s DataCloud won a 2020 AI Breakthrough Award in the “Best AI-based Solution for Data Science” category. Watch the video.
In a constantly shifting world of work, businesses, now more than ever, are looking for a solution that helps them make informed decisions about their organization. Enter ADP DataCloud, a powerful people analytics solution.
Utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI), the solution analyzes aggregated, anonymized HR and compensation data from over 30 million workers in more than 730,000 organizations to allow companies to benchmark and compare compensation data, turnover rate, and overtime. Endless possibilities open for better managing a global workforce when pairing this empirical data with the power of machine learning (ML) and AI.
The AI Breakthrough Awards recognize the top companies, technologies, and products in the Artificial Intelligence industry today. As more and more companies join the growing global AI market, this awards program honors those that stand out among a crowded field of competitors. In other categories, winners included IBM, Capital One, NetApp, and others.
Congratulations to the team for all your hard work to deliver amazing solutions and real-time trends to our clients. Way to break through!
Tech & Innovation Blog
Brazil Lab’s Carlos Nascimento Wins First Round NASA International Space Apps Challenge
Voice of Our People, Recognition, Innovation
Creating something out of this world almost came naturally to Carlos Nascimento, literally while he slept. Read about his innovation here.
Carlos recently won the first stage of the NASA International Space Apps Challenge. Yes, that NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration…
Carlos developed a solution responsible for dynamically organizing the entire circadian cycle of astronauts, using Convolutional Neural Networks, being able to interpret brain frequencies, predict and stimulate the next stages of sleep.
“I could not have done this without the experience and knowledge I earned by working at ADP Brazil Labs,” said Carlos. “At the innovation center, we are working on a project that uses machine learning, which gave me the necessary knowledge and inspiration that I used for the NASA competition.”
NASA’s hackathon was the largest globally to develop an innovative app for its astronauts. With only 48 hours of active development, Carlos decided to focus on machine learning and brain signals. He gathered a team of his friends to select the challenge. They thought: “You know what? Everybody has some kind of sleep problem! Let’s help with that!”
Carlos will represent Brazil on the global stage, where they will choose the six best solutions.
At ADP, Carlos and his team work on a product that leverages machine learning. According to Carlos, “The best thing about working with Machine Learning is that the field is always evolving with new ideas and updates.”
Before Carlos travels to spaces and places, we caught up with him to learn just a little bit more:
What advice do you have for someone looking to participate in a global challenge?
These events are about innovation and teamwork, so choose your team wisely with professionals from different fields like designers, developers, and data scientists and read a lot about the subject you plan to solve.
What is your must-have app personally?
Brave Private Browser. We should always be very careful with our data. Like we are at ADP.
What is your favorite movie?
Interstellar.
If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Chocolate. I probably wouldn’t live much, but it would be a happy life.
What is the best advice you ever received?
Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated.
What’s the best place you’ve ever traveled to on vacation, and why?
That would be Arraial do Cabo. It’s close to my hometown, Rio de Janeiro. It has the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen.
Carlos will receive an award from the U.S. Embassy in Brazil for his work in the NASA Challenge. Results for 40 finalist teams, and six winning global teams, will be revealed in January 2021!
Congratulations, Carlos! Good luck to you and your team in the next round!
Learn more about working at Brazil Labs.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Next-Gen Payroll Captures the 2020 Top HR Product Award
Recognition, Awards
ADP’s products continue to earn awards at a time when our clients need our innovative products the most. We are proud to be named a “2020 Top HR Product” by HR Executive.
ADP’s products continue to earn awards at a time when our clients need our innovative products the most. We are proud to be named a “2020 Top HR Product” by HR Executive.
ADP’s Next-Gen Payroll Platform enables companies of all types – from local small businesses to global conglomerates – to pay their employees their way. This real-time global payroll platform gives clients and their employees unprecedented transparency into how they are paid, along with predictive insights and suggested actions. Companies no longer need to guess the impact of regulatory changes but can proactively model these changes in real-time and plan for the future. At the same time, employees, contractors, and gig workers all have complete visibility into how their pay is calculated along with actionable tips on improving their financial wellness. Who couldn’t use that?
Built natively on the public cloud, this real-time global payroll platform:
- Gives practitioners and employees unprecedented transparency into how they are paid;
- Empowers practitioners to more easily understand the effects of regulatory and policy changes, enabling a stronger strategic partnership with business leaders by demonstrating bottom-line impact; and
- Delivers a breakthrough employee experience with predictive insights to model and understand the effect of potential life changes.
Winning solutions at the HR Technology Conference are selected based on several criteria, including their level of innovation, value-add to the HR professional, intuitiveness for the user, and ability to deliver on what they promise.
ADP Uses Amazon Neptune to Model the Agile Modern Workplace
ADP Uses Amazon Neptune to Model the Agile Modern Workplace
2020
Global human capital management (HCM) solutions provider Automatic Data Processing (ADP) recently took a bold step as part of its strategy to be on the “innovation offensive.” ADP’s digital transformation unit, Lifion, launched ADP’s next gen HCM, a system designed to model a dynamic modern workplace where work gets done in teams rather than traditional hierarchal structures. But the system’s original database solution used multiple self-managed databases—including relational databases like multimaster MySQL clusters—and wasn’t ideal for completing the complex queries that ADP needed to deliver advanced capabilities to its customers. Plus, the effort of managing those databases was a burden on the next gen HCM staff.
Having already used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for self-managed database provisioning, the company looked to AWS for a fully managed database solution, and it found one in Amazon Neptune, a fast, reliable graph database that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. This purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine is optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds latency. By using Amazon Neptune, ADP’s next gen HCM cut costs by eliminating database licenses and increased staff productivity and time to market while delivering customers a unique set of customizable HR solutions.
We like app-level encryption in addition to database-level encryption. When we use Amazon Neptune, the data is already encrypted before it gets to the database, and then it’s encrypted again at rest.”
Zaid Masud
Chief Architect, ADP’s next gen HCM
Using a Purpose-Built Graph Database to Model the Modern Workplace
ADP offers HCM software solutions for automating payroll, core human resources (HR), talent management, benefits, and workforce management for companies ranging from small businesses to global corporations. Since its founding in 1949, ADP has stayed on the cutting edge of HCM technologies, which led to the launch of next gen HCM. “Today there are many types of workplace structures, and traditional HCM systems have not embraced that,” says Zaid Masud, chief architect for ADP’s next gen HCM. The Dynamic Teams features of ADP’s next gen HCM aim to help organizations break out of the traditional workplace hierarchy by taking team members out of silos, improving engagement and performance, and creating a culture of connectivity.
Building such a solution required a database that could seamlessly manage an extensive network of complex data points. Yet ADP’s next gen HCM first launched using dozens of various self-managed databases with a microservices-driven architecture running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. The collection of databases included relational databases like multimaster MySQL clusters, distributed key-value stores, and column family stores. “We have more than 200 microservices,” Masud explains, “and each domain has its own data storage needs. As you can imagine, this grew in complexity and became unmanageable very quickly.”
The company knew it needed a managed database solution to reduce staff workload. It also needed to move away from a relational database to a graph database. Querying relational databases is challenging and required the next gen HCM team to denormalize the data, or add redundant data, in order to speed retrieval, which wasn’t efficient. “When you start trying to ask relational databases complex questions like approval flows, it becomes pretty unwieldy,” explains Masud. In contrast, a graph database offered ADP’s next gen HCM the agile storage it needed. “Graph databases naturally represent your structure in the way it’s designed or visualized, which enables us to build much more dynamic queries.”
The next gen HCM team had a number of requirements for a graph database in addition to a fully managed service. It needed a low-code app development framework that would enable it to develop highly customizable HCM applications without writing code. “We needed to manage people, data, benefits, parallel integrations such as time and attendance, vacation balances, and time off,” explains Masud. “So many things must be customized at every level to account for client-specific needs, regional needs, and compliance needs.” ADP’s next gen HCM also wanted a graph database with open-source standards, which would help the team avoid lock-in. The team first heard about Amazon Neptune when it was announced at the 2017 AWS re:Invent conference. “We felt that Amazon Neptune was a slam dunk because our application was already using these open standards,” says Masud.
Enabling Dynamic Queries with Amazon Neptune
Amazon Neptune easily builds queries that efficiently navigate highly connected datasets, enabling the next gen HCM team to build applications that use ADP’s wealth of data to answer complex workplace questions for a variety of use cases. For example, a company that wants to internally fill an open position can use ADP’s next gen HCM to search for existing employees who satisfy the skill sets and requirements for the role. “Writing a query, plugging in criteria, and viewing a list of employees who qualify are things that Amazon Neptune is very well suited for,” says Lucky Jain, engineering manager, next gen HCM. “It can answer these questions and quickly return the data.” Users of ADP’s next gen HCM also can access a range of capabilities such as data reporting based on specific use cases and criteria-based authorization. This enables customers to build their own teams, or groups of employees, and then create authorization rules for that group, limiting or granting them permission to view information like salaries, personally identifiable information, and business plans. “It has given us broader use cases in our current features for customers that we never thought we could have accomplished in our early products,” says Jain. Key to this customization are next gen HCM’s low-code development platform and Amazon Neptune’s flexible query capabilities. “One of the really powerful things about our low-code app development platform is that it enables you to build no-code graph traversal queries,” adds Masud. “That’s what we use Amazon Neptune for.”
The migration to Amazon Neptune decreased next gen HCM’s total cost of ownership, eliminating the need to have skilled people operating database clusters 24/7. Now staff can focus on cloud infrastructure and site reliability engineering operations, enabling ADP’s next gen HCM to further grow its platform without adding additional staff. “We were self-managing everything from operating system–level things like patching, backups, and point-in-time restores to security vulnerabilities,” says Masud. “Spending less time on those things significantly improves our time to market.” ADP also avoids paying for database licensing and reduces spending on Amazon EC2. Amazon Neptune provides high availability using a minimum of two nodes compared to three with next gen HCM’s former solution. “We expect an increase in reliability and availability with Amazon Neptune, which means that we’re running less of an exposure risk.”
Amazon Neptune has multiple levels of security, including encryption at rest, which is important in securing next gen HCM’s sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information. On an encrypted Amazon Neptune instance, data in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are the automated backups, snapshots, and replicas in the same cluster. “We like app-level encryption in addition to database-level encryption,” says Masud. “With Amazon Neptune, sensitive data is already encrypted before it gets to the database, and then it’s encrypted again at rest.” Amazon Neptune also satisfies end users’ requirements for compliance with Service Organization Control and General Data Protection Regulation. “We’re very comfortable telling our customers that we are on AWS,” says Masud. “They can even register and download AWS Service Organization Control compliance reports on their own.”
Optimizing Workplace Management
ADP’s next gen HCM is exploring multitenancy using Amazon Neptune to better represent the structure of its customer data: currently, each customer has its own isolated graph. Masud says AWS has been very responsive to ADP’s needs: “AWS has a way of getting things out to market quickly and then refining that and iterating over that. We were able to give some direct service feedback to the Amazon Neptune team.” The company is also investigating serverless frameworks on AWS.
With the fully managed Amazon Neptune, ADP eliminated database licensing, reduced Amazon EC2 costs, and enabled its team to focus on core business operations rather than database maintenance. But most importantly, it was able to use the purpose-built graph database to power complex queries and deliver to its customers advanced HR applications that it wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
About ADP
Founded in 1949, ADP designs cutting-edge products, premium services, and exceptional experiences informed by data for HR, talent, time management, benefits, and payroll that enable people to reach their full potential.
Benefits of AWS
- Reduced costs
- Boosted time to market
- Improved staff productivity
- Eliminated database licensing fees
- Secured sensitive data
- Provided Service Organization Control and General Data Protection Regulation compliance
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Karen H. (Tech Lead; 21 years at ADP): I joined ADP because of its reputation in the industry and as an employer. I saw the opportunity to grow my career with a company that is among the best.
Gina G. (Product Owner; 7 years): After earning my master’s, I heard about an awesome graduate internship program at ADP. ADP’s mission, vision, and values aligned closely with my personal interests—and that’s still true today. We have a constant focus on ensuring the client experience is best-in-class, and we offer endless career opportunities to our team; we want everyone to grow and remain passionate about what we do.
David Z. (Director, Application Development; 17.5 years): Back in the early 2000s, a few former co-workers told me that ADP’s retirement services business was growing quickly and that the company was positioned to grow market share. And that’s certainly been true—our client base has tripled since I joined. The role was also a chance to bring my experience designing, creating, and testing similar processing for healthcare plans for our retirement products.
Bhargav A. (Scrum Master; 5.5 years): As a software engineer, I’m passionate about adopting new technical skills. ADP offered a rewarding career, with challenging opportunities to understand our core business and develop products with the latest technologies.
Pradip P. (Principal QA Engineer; 5 years): ADP is a growing organization with many opportunities. I knew the role would be challenging and that I’d learn a lot.
Karan N. (Technical Lead; 4 years): I was looking for a role that would help me grow my technical skills and personally. Luckily, I met someone from ADP who shared his experience and told me about the fantastic culture. That’s exactly what I’ve found here.
Damodhar M. (Manager, 13 years): I’m very excited to work for ADP. It’s an excellent company with plenty of opportunities to learn and grow. The business model ADP follows (Simplify-Innovate-Grow) provides me opportunities to work on multiple technologies.
Vasudeo J. (Consultant, 6 years): I heard about ADP from my friend, and he told me that ADP is the best place to work among all IT companies and suggested that I join. My decision was correct. I love working with ADP because of culture in every sense, i.e., work, fun at work, family day, and all other mega-events that happen when we are working in the office.
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Gyan S. (Member Technical, 3 years): ADP has a fantastic work culture. It values its employees as much as the customers. Every day at work brings new challenges and learning.
Sunil K. (Member Technical, 1.7 years): It offers an excellent opportunity to learn and implement innovative ideas. I like the ADP work culture.
Preeti R. (Member Technical, 1.6 years): When I got hired, I felt my skills are particularly well-suited to this position. But I like ADP’s culture too.
Tell us a fun fact about yourself.
Karen H.: I love to ski. During the winter, I teach skiing in my spare time.
Gina G.: I’m a thrill seeker! I once sky-dived, and you’ll often find me hiking the mountains in Hawaii. I find thrills at work, too. I love being a part of digital transformation efforts that simplify client experience and streamline our internal business processes.
David Z.: Nineteen years ago, I formed a team in the Metuchen Softball League, and we finally became league champions. I also play on a 50 and over team that has won the Middlesex County champions a couple of times, and for the past three years, we’ve won the state championship.
Bhargav A.: I’m always eager to learn new things and implement challenging solutions. But when I get some free time, I love to disconnect from the world to visit wildlife.
Pradip P.: I like sports—watching them, but also like getting outside and playing them myself.
Karan N.: I love playing badminton and exploring new places with my friends.
Damodhar M.: When I’m off work, I love to follow current events across the world to stay updated.
Vasudeo J.: I love sleeping. A few months back, I got a call from my friend at around midnight, had a conversation, and had no memory of it the next day. I guess I made sense, he didn’t realize I wasn’t awake.
Shivani K.: Reading a new book or creating a craft.
Gyan S.: I try to add and refine my skills so that I can become more productive at work. I take time to analyze how can we improve as a team, raise the bar and have fun too.
Sunil K.: If the world is facing a big problem, I imagine myself as a hero who saves the world.
Preeti R.: I have a huge sweet tooth!
There you have it!
Team, thanks for sharing your ADP experience, and congratulation for a job well done!
