TechLead-Story: Martin Bachler, CTO von Netconomy

TechLeadStory

Martin Bachler

Team

Wie groß ist das Dev-Team? Wie setzt sich das Team, in Funktionen aufgeteilt, zusammen?

Our dev team has roughly a size of 200 people, who are spread across Europe. We have dedicated roles for backend and frontend software engineers and we offer, besides other career possibilities, a technical career path, which ends at Software Architect.

Wie ist euer Dev-Team organisiert und aus welchem Grund habt ihr euch für eine bestimmte Organisation entschieden? Worin liegen die Vorteile, wo die Nachteile?

Our dev team is organized in about 30 scrum teams. Ideally one team works for one client. For bigger clients multiple teams work in a scaled-scrum approach on the same project, for smaller clients one team works for more than one client. Our teams have a great degree of freedom and therefore also responsibility. We don't have typical team leads, teams are self-organizing instead. Each employee has a line manager, who cares about the personal development and performance. We strongly believe that autonomous teams are able to create the best possible solutions.

Was macht euer Team im Vergleich zu anderen Teams besonders?

We offer a lot of flexibility, our scrum teams can use it to develop their own style of working and collaboration. We encourage cross-team collaboration and innovation. We are committed to innovation, regardless if its technical or on business level.

Recruiting

Wie ist eure Dev-Abteilung in den Recruiting-Prozess integriert?

The dev team participates in each step of the process, from the very beginning on. In example the second interview consists of three sessions with engineers and related line managers.

Gibt es ein konkretes Prozedere für neue Kollegen? Wie werden diese integriert?

We have an onboarding program, run by our internal training department called Netcademy, which takes place in the first month at the company. There our new engineers get to know the company, our style of working and the technical processes and frameworks we are working with. Additionally they are trained on real-life examples within a simulated scrum sprint. After the onboarding program our new engineers join one of our scrum teams and get a mentor, who is responsible for the project specific onboarding and accompanies the new engineer during the first months in the teams.

Neben der fachlichen Qualifikation, worauf legt ihr noch Wert, wenn ihr nach Entwicklern für euer Team sucht?

We are looking for engineers, which are eager to learn and tackle new technologies and challenges. We are looking for self-organized people, who are willing to contribute at the whole life-cycle of our software development process.

Technologien

Welchen technischen Herausforderungen seht ihr Euch gegenüber?

In the domain of e-commerce, we are facing challenging performance, security requirements and bleeding edge UX. We are driving the digital commerce business together with our clients. With respect to innovation, we need to deliver fast and iterative. Our product has to integrate itself seamless into the IT landscape of our customer, we get a lot of interesting integration scenarios there. Since many of our clients compete with companies from silicon valley we need to be aware of the latest trends both in technology and design.

Mit welchen Technologien arbeitet ihr?

We work with Java (from 8 up to 11), spring, single page applications with react and angular and spring boot based microservices. Everything is operated in a cloud-based kubernetes cluster. Additionally, we build iOS and Android apps to support additional channels and services.

Wie hat sich die Technologie des Unternehmens seit der Gründung verändert?

We evolve our technology stack constantly. Single page applications and Kubernetes with docker are the default technologies at the moment. We encourage our teams to constantly experiment with new technologies and frameworks. We currently run experiments with VueJS, React-Native and GO.