The Engineering Team

How we work

Our engineering department is distributed around Europe and working mostly remotely. However, people also have the option of working in our large brand-new office space in central Vienna if they prefer to.

Our engineering teams consist of engineers and a team lead, who also is an engineer and involved in technical tasks. Every team is responsible for a specific domain like the customer facing web interface, the management interface for merchants, or our payment system. There is also a platform team responsible for the overall design of the platform and its infrastructure.

Working in squads

For working on cross-functional features, members from different teams come together in squads and organise work with our product managers. While teams generally tend to stick to Kanban, squads are using Scrum with a 2 week sprint.

Features are mapped out and prioritised and then picked up either by an individual or a pair depending on the complexity, this usually involves online/offline discussion of what and how to build the feature. Once a feature is ready for deployment it is reviewed either with a live review on a call or via a GitLab review process.

The review is an iterative step which is a critical piece of the process, constructive feedback and help are the cornerstones of this (and the occasional nitpick). Everyone is expected to contribute to the review process as it helps build a shared understanding and common set of values and standards amongst the team.

Once a PR has been reviewed there are few final steps before it gets merged to master and become ready for deployment. Master is precious, we strive to keep its history clean.

We are fans of Continuous Delivery and are working to have a well automated build, testing and deployment system. We always try to get new features and fixes into production in a simple and consistent manner and as often as possible.

Collaboration and exchange of ideas are encouraged through active discussions on Mattermost (open-source Slack alternative) and via Jitsi video calls.