Position Summary

Introduction

 

Trilogy Interactive, a digital political consulting firm, is looking to scale Spoke to send up to 10 million daily segments. We are accepting proposals to find a qualified source to implement the necessary features to utilize either the Bandwidth Messaging API or the Twilio SMS API on a multi-tenant Spoke instance. Our goals are to:

 

• Internally queue daily send volumes of up to 5 million two segment messages per day
• Incrementally send queued segments over either Bandwidth or Twilio’s API
• Deploy Spoke on Azure server or optimize Heroku deployment configuration
• Set up data warehouse and configure ETL pipeline
• Build application to append carrier data to contact list using Bandwidth Number Lookup API or the Twilio Lookup API
• Design and monitor QA tests for large scale volume

 

Background

 

Trilogy Interactive launched our first SMS platform, Textify, in 2021. We’ve sent over 50 million messages on behalf of political campaigns, committees, and non-profit organizations. We are looking to expand our capacity to meet the growing demand from our clients. We’ve deployed testing instances of Spoke on Heroku integrated with both Twilio and Bandwidth accounts. We’re looking to scale our applications to meet the anticipated volume of the end of this election cycle.

 

Project Description

 

Application Send Queue 

We would like to create queuing functionality on our Spoke application to ensure that high volume texting periods do not exceed aggregator sending queues. Bandwidth’s Messaging API allows for a send queue of 900 seconds, with total queue segment volume determined by the throughput limits associated with the account. To avoid the need to resend messages due to a full aggregator queue, we would like a feature to internally queue segments that exceed the aggregator queue’s capacity and send segments to the aggregator queue at the same dequeue rate. This functionality should include:

• Application queue capacity of over 10 million segments
• Capacity to pause and resume sending of segments from the application queue to aggregators
• Dashboard showing counts of the application queue size and the aggregator queue size
• Compatibility with both Bandwidth and Twilio API

 

Deployment Optimization

Trilogy utilizes Azure to host our other applications. We would like to deploy Spoke on Azure to streamline our hosting vendor relationships. At present, our Spoke application is hosted on Heroku. In the event that we’re unable to deploy Spoke on Azure, we would like to optimize our Heroku dynos and database resources to ensure stability during high volume texting hours and minimize costs during texting downtime.

 

Data Warehouse and ETL Pipeline

Trilogy would like to provision a data warehouse to accommodate data analysis of our SMS programs. We would like an ETL pipeline designed that can standardize data from both our current texting platform as well as the Spoke texting application to be scaled up as a result of this request for proposals.

 

Number Lookup API

To evaluate SMS best practices, Trilogy would like to append carrier information utilizing the Bandwidth Number Lookup API. This functionality should include:

• CSV contact uploader capable of accepting file sizes of up to 2 million records
• Extract and standardize formatting of phone numbers
• Segment and sequence API calls according to rate limits
• Append line provider values to original CSV for download

 

QA Testing

Trilogy would like to design and run a QA process for this Spoke application to ensure stability during the highest volume periods of the election cycle with daily send volumes of up to 10 million segments.

 

These features will be developed under the GNU GPL License.

 

This project should be completed by April 30th.

 

Compensation

 

This work will be billed on an ongoing hourly basis based on the goals of this request for proposals. The hourly rate is negotiable.