Case Study: WeWork achieves lightning-fast, scalable inventory search and a seamless member experience with Algolia

Empowering every Community Manager to provide a seamless customer experience

WeWork, the global shared‑workspace provider operating in 700+ locations, depends on thousands of Community Managers who use an internal tool called Spacestation to manage inventory and serve members. As the company scaled, its Rails/Postgres setup produced slow, inflexible search that was hard to test and maintain, creating a poor developer experience and slowing day‑to‑day member support while handling millions of monthly queries.

WeWork implemented Algolia’s distributed SaaS indexing via a simple API, moving search off the database and into a globally distributed index that powers both the public site and Spacestation. The result was fast, relevant, and stable search that’s easy to maintain—freeing engineers to address other priorities and delivering a more seamless experience for members and thousands of Community Managers.

WeWork

Fernando Padilla

Software Engineer