Good read even if you're not an AWS shop. The interview has insights that go beyond AWS specifics such as dependency management in large-scale systems and relationships and roles of dev and ops teams.
Voice matters and it hard to build, especially for engineers. http://voiceandtone.com/ from MailChilp offers a good framework of designing a voice by cataloguing touch-points between the software and the user. You may or may not find MailChimp's voice fitting, but the framework itself is quite useful.
Hopper is a search engine for making trips. We use information extraction, machine learning, distributed computing and custom search algorithms to transform ridiculously huge volumes of data into useful information. Interested? Get in touch.
We hire smart people who get the job done. Yeah, we use a lot of Java. And RoR. And Hadoop, Cassandra, etc. We use AWS and we run a DC stuffed with custom-configured servers. In general, the knowledge of a specific technology/language/framework we already use can be helpful, but not a requirement. Chances are, you don't know everything you need to know to do this job. So willingness and ability to learn is a requirement.
Design is a strong advantage, but not sustainable one. Unless the design requires hard-to-replicate data or algorithms, design alone isn't a sustainable competitive advantage.
The data that Hipmunk displays is available to any other OTA. If the intent is to grow independent company they'll need to build that sustainable advantage (beyond UI patents).
