“You Have More Decision Power” at Spacely
Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer Tony Duong explains how Spacely's small, highly-integrated workforce results in more visibility and versatility for developers.
“I love the team here,” said Tony Duong, Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer. “Everyone’s so friendly and supportive. It’s a very small team here at Spacely.”
How small? There are 15 developers overall, and 5 on the backend team. However, last year several backend engineers went on paternity leave at the same time. This reduced the backend team to just two members, with Tony as the team lead. “If you have a baby here, don’t worry, we will take care of you,” Tony confirmed.
Currently Spacely, a spatial data platform for creating 360 degree VR content, is actively expanding its teams. Yet Tony also feels that many of the company’s best features arise from its smaller size. “Since it’s a small company, we recognize your work very easily, right? When it’s a big company, you are just a cog in a machine.”
When you are in a small company, you have more decision power. You talk about stuff and you can propose improvements, and everyone is listening to you. That’s why I like working here.
What Spacely does
“We work closely with real estate companies,” Tony explained.
Spacely provides virtual reality players where you can see a house or an apartment in a 3D space.
“There are many use cases, right?” he said. “Some people want to buy a house and they want to see the house in 3D before buying it. . . . Or you have some companies who use it as training. For example, if there are some factory workers who are going to work there, then before [they start] working, they can try to use that VR environment and see how it looks.”
What brought him to Spacely
Tony originally came to Japan in 2018 as a web developer intern: “[I saw] the job posting on Facebook and I was about to graduate, so I was just trying to find some job. I applied without a lot of hope, you know, and then I got the job and came here.”
Eight years later, a job posting at Spacely caught his eye. Tony had some prior experience with VR and was interested in working with it again. He also wanted to transition back into doing more development, since he’d taken on more management tasks at his previous company. “I did a lot of code reviews, and was always in a lot of meetings too, with the PMs, making the technical decisions for the team.
“So that was very nice. But I wanted to have a position closer to the code, still do the management thing but also develop features.”
Project-based teamwork
“When I first joined the company, I was a senior backend engineer,” said Tony. “That was my title, but there was a team lead who was taking care of reporting to the PMs, doing more management stuff, and that person wanted to take paternity leave, so I took his place.”
Despite that, Tony explained, he doesn’t spend all his time working with the backend team. “Actually, it’s the opposite.”
For every project, we have members from each team assigned to it. So I work more with the front-end mobile [team], and even the R\&D engineers, rather than the backend engineers.
He gave an example of what they’re currently developing. “These days, we’re trying to push AI features in the application. Some clients want to enhance their real estate images, right? They want to make the resolution more clear, and also add furniture in.”
Later Tony clarified that he spends around half his time collaborating with other teams, and half with his own. “ We have our daily meeting with only the backend engineers, and we also consult each other for technical problems or to talk about the specifications.”
In particular, they assist with code reviews. “Even if [we] are not working together, we’re still reviewing each other’s code. And before working on [a project] we write the specifications . . . and that is going to help other backend engineers understand what you’re trying to do. Also, [we] use that for the AI.”
Encouraged to use AI tools
“Everyone is using AI, actually,” said Tony. “We don’t all use the same tools. Some people prefer Claude Code, some prefer Cursor, for example.
“The company supports that and is encouraging [us] to use these features. We also had an AI workshop last year for the whole company, where we were encouraged to experiment with other AI features like MCP servers, or using AI to generate some 3D models, and do a presentation showcasing our projects.”
I think AI is a big part of the company now, and I think for every engineer, if you want to keep up to date with the latest trends, you have to incorporate AI into your process as much as you can.
“But AI is not perfect,” he added, “so it’s always necessary to review.”
One way they’re incorporating AI is by using it to enforce some of their new coding guidelines. “We’re using [those guidelines] and inputting [them] to the agents. We use a markdown file, or we also use MCP servers to connect what is written on Notion, and then just apply the same rules in the code that is going to be generated. So that’s very cool, and we are trying every time to leave the code better than we found it.”
Thirty percent of sprint time dedicated to quality
“We have a two week sprint,” said Tony. “And we try to assign 70 percent of our [time] to development tasks, like adding features and maintaining them.
“And 30 percent . . . we try to focus on the health of the app: doing refactoring, monitoring the database, trying to improve the performance. [Also] doing some bug fixes that come either from our bug-reporting tool or from the CS team, which reports feedback from the clients. We’re trying to do that daily.”
Why so much focus on refactoring? “Spacely is eight years old now,” Tony explained. “So there are a lot of improvements to be done. I think it’s the same for every code base.”
Prioritizing app health over speed has become a personal mission for Tony. “I pushed [management] a lot to improve quality,” he said.
I think it’s very important, not only for now, but also for future engineers that are going to join here.
Things can change quickly—for the better
Luckily, the management at Spacely is receptive to suggestions. “The thing is that at Spacely, it’s a very flexible environment, so you can propose anything. And everyone is very friendly and supportive to be honest.”
It’s very easy to propose new ideas and ask, ‘What about improving that? What about refactoring that?’ And no one is going to say, ‘No time.’
For example, Spacely was originally using several different programs and locations for documentation. “I just proposed it—I mean, along with other engineers, of course. ‘What about using Notion or putting all the documentation in one place so that it’s easy to find the information?’ . . . And we implemented this in the last year very quickly. So that’s the strong point of Spacely I would say, flexibility.”
That flexibility and friendliness extend to the top. “Our VP of Engineering, John, is very supportive of the engineering teams. He’s not some person you never see. . . . He understands what we’re trying to do.”
Staying versatile
Moving between projects and teams, feature development and refactoring, coding and management, means that Tony has to keep a lot of balls in the air.
“The thing is,” said Tony, “you need to be very versatile in Spacely. That’s a good thing, and a bad thing if it’s not managed properly, I would say. So I try to allocate time very clearly between those tasks, because if you don’t manage that, you end up doing a lot of overtime work.”
Luckily, even as team lead, he doesn’t have to shoulder the whole burden. “It’s not only one person. You can delegate to other people. . . . Like when we had two people last year who went on paternity leave, then I needed to take that position. But now that one person has come back, we can switch again.”
It’s not very vertical. It’s very horizontal so everyone can have a bit of the management tasks. We try to make it work with everyone.
Developers also have the choice to switch between teams. “Recently, an iOS engineer began taking on more backend work, and we were able to welcome him into the team. We were at a phase where we were short on backend engineers so it was a win-win situation.”
Working at Spacely
Why would Tony recommend Spacely for other developers? “I can say Spacely is able to offer you challenges and opportunities to grow if you are willing to take them,” he said. “John [VP of Engineering] said, ‘Be bold and take risks. Better try to do something and fail than to not try at all’.”
That precisely describes how Tony became team lead. “You can have a lot of responsibilities if you ask them here. That’s why John hired me to [take on] a team lead position, and now I’m doing both management and development, which is quite good.”
I actually didn’t think I would like it. I’m more of a technical guy. I thought, ‘I don’t want to do a lot of meetings, talking with people, etc.’ But actually I came to enjoy onboarding new people as well, talking with people and just trying to be a good mentor.
The engineering team is quite international, with around half the developers coming from Japan, and the other half made up of Swedish, Swiss, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, American, and French developers. However, the company language is Japanese.
“Everyone speaks Japanese here,” Tony explained. “This is one of the requirements, actually.” Individuals do tend to converse in whichever language they’re stronger in, but overall documentation and meetings are in Japanese. That doesn’t mean an employee’s Japanese needs to be perfect, Tony clarified, so long as you can communicate with the team and PMs.
He also appreciates Spacely’s work-life balance. Aside from core hours between 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., engineers are free to choose their start and stop times. “I don’t feel we are doing a lot of overtime here, to be honest,” he said. And while the Spacely office is located in Shibuya, many of the team live elsewhere and work remotely. “I also plan to move to Saga very soon.”
Despite this, Tony commented, “There’s not much distance between the engineers. There’s a lot of communication going through Slack. I think it’s a very friendly atmosphere here.” Aside from those online interactions, the company also hosts in-person events several times a year.
Even if you don’t see each other that often, I feel that everyone is very close.