CARDLESS

Structure:

A lot of thought is being put into how we would like to build out the engineering team moving forward. Our goal is to have small autonomous teams that work closely together and have a lot of ownership over all the projects they are working on. We believe it's important for each team to be self-sustaining - in that they can tackle their own problems without having to heavily rely on another team in order to complete something - but collaborative. Each team would have their own roadmaps, sprints, and stand-ups with everyone coming together once a week for our EPD All-Hands.

Process:

The small size of our team means that we can focus and be on the same page from the beginning, while also moving quickly. Our process starts at the leadership level where the big-picture company goals and strategies are defined quarterly (sometimes even monthly). With these in mind, managers/leads can align with engineers and then collaborate with the product team to decide which projects to work on to achieve those goals. Each team will have their own roadmaps that are written every other month, 2 week sprints, weekly EPD All Hands, and daily stand-ups.

In addition, we have an engineering design template for new services and features, followed by design reviews and code reviews. The change will be automatically deployed to staging for testing once it's merged, and manually deployed to production every week.

1. Finance is complex so it's imperative that all teams within Cardless collaborate cross-functionally to figure out the best ways to build our products so that consumers understand what they are seeing. We’re building a financial system, so getting it right in a way that is easy to use and easy to understand is of the utmost importance to our brand partners and end users. The question we want to ask is how do we build the right abstractions to allow our consumers to find our product easy to use and easy to understand? However, what is always top-of-mind when designing our system is that we build it in a way that is highly scalable and robust from the start. This will ensure that the engineering team can handle our business needs as we grow.

2. Being a fintech company means that we must strive for correctness, quality, and security while also trying to move as quickly as possible. So the question we need to answer here is, what will be the right software architecture to build and the right abstraction to create to iterate rapidly while still maintaining a high quality product?

3. Being a startup means that there is still a lot that needs to be built out; from our infrastructure to our tools to our scalability. Cardless does adopt modern micro-service architecture and cloud-native infrastructure so you don’t need to worry about common tech startup issues like working in a toe-stepping monolithic repo and migration chaos later on. However, there is still so much work to be done, and that's a challenge we are excited to face.