Senior Backend Developer
Devengo is a startup focused on a simple but ambitious mission: to make finance a fairer place. Founded by well-known fintech players Fernando Cabello-Astolfi and Alberto Molpeceres Their first product is a scalable and simple API that allows any company, big or small, to send and receive instant payments. A business bank account you can programmatically use in real-time.
What will you do?
They have invested the last three years in discovering a thousand ways of making Salary Advance that don't work -to paraphrase Edison. They recently decided to collect all they have learned and pivot Devengo to laser-focus on the transformative technology they have mastered: instant payments.
They are all gotten used to real-time experiences when it comes to consumer services. Stream any movie on demand, call a cab anytime, and order food in a few seconds. However, there are still a few areas that have historically resisted change. Money transfers in the traditional banking sector are among the most painful for many people -and businesses.
They can get same-day delivery for the physical stuff; still, the transfer of your hard-earned paycheck will take two days to arrive (three at the weekends and holidays!), your e-commerce return will take a week, and that insurance claim... well, who knows. Many people legitimately wonder if a bank clerk is boringly strolling and dragging his feet between one office and the other.
But the situation has been rapidly changing in the last years, and they have had a front-row seat to this transformation, processing hundreds of thousands of operations and millions of euros for our salary advance customers. They have now experienced how vital and transformative instant payment technology can be for digital experiences.
Early adopters are rapidly mapping this landscape of opportunities and possibilities across Europe. The percentage of transfers that are migrating from the slow, traditional scheme to the new instant processing more than doubles each year:
And if we talk about the money involved, the last two years have seen an increase of +300% in the euros moved instantly across Europe and currently a billion euros are transferred daily in the blink of an eye. And that is just in one of the available networks!
But their vision goes much further than this first step of democratizing access to instant payments in Europe; they will soon launch in other non-EU areas, and to make this vision a reality, they need your help. We're looking for a Senior Backend Developer to join thier team, embrace their vision, create some life-improving services for companies, and kick some asses in the process.
Your evolution
In 1 month
You'll be assigned an onboarding buddy who will help and guide you with the onboarding process. With a lot of support from this person and the rest of the team:
- You will meet all the Devengers and learn what they care about and how you will work with them.
- You will set up all our systems in your local environment and know how their main components work.
- You will attend multiple sessions of their Devengo Academy, learning a lot about payments.
- You will ship some simple stuff to production.
- You will have your first 1-on-1 with the CTO.
Your responsibilities
Participarás de todo el ciclo de creación de software, de la exploración y diseño al desarrollo y el despliegue, haciéndote responsable de principio a fin.
Romperás grandes piezas funcionales en tareas más pequeñas, estimando de manera pragmática la duración y el alcance de las mismas.
Desarrollarás código robusto y mantenible con su correspondiente cobertura de tests.
Pasarás un tiempo cada mes ayudando al equipo de OPS para conseguir una comprensión más profunda del producto y su complejidad operacional.
Harás peer review del trabajo de tus compañeros asegurándote de aprender de ellos y de que generais un trabajo de máxima calidad.
How will you do it?
High level view
Their process loosely merges practices from Kanban and Scrum with a focus on the principles of Continuous Delivery.
Their workflow is currently organized in 2-weeks sprints. The Product and Tech teams work together to define the scope of the tasks and prioritize them. Both teams work closely to ensure that business needs and new software features will always be perfectly aligned.
The work inside a sprint is broken down into tasks, using a Jira board to visualize and manage this process.
Developers are then free to pick from the board what they want to work on if there is no other mate already working on it.
In the daily meeting, the team meets to provide status updates, discuss blockers and explain what's coming next.
Their Culture
The first step to do any substantial work is to establish the common ground they all want to defend, the fundamental ideas about how Devengo does business we want to share. These are our key values:
It’s all about finesse
Finesse is defined as "refinement and delicacy of performance, execution or artisanship". They know that there is a non-negligible number of companies out there that can do what they do. So what makes us different? It's the finesse of our work, the way everything is taken care of down to the smallest detail, with impressive thoroughness, effectiveness, and rigour.
Zen pragmatism
Buddhist monks and practitioners are instructed to ponder this question: "Since death alone is certain, and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?" There will always be an infinite amount of scenarios, projects, and ideas worth pursuing… and their resources, time, and energy to do it will be inevitably finite. It's our task to deal with this fact gracefully and pragmatically.
Do the right thing
Every time Devengo interacts with the world, they should hold theirselves to the highest standards. They will methodically destruct the expectation of “just another company” when it comes to candor. We will systematically demolish the idea of “but everybody does that” when the topic at hand is equity.
When all these things turn to dust, they will sweep them away and replace them with fairness and empathy. And their customers will never deserve or receive less help and understanding than our neighbours or friends. They will not able to always say yes, but they will never fail to evaluate and lend a hand when possible.
Managers of one
Devengo employs great people, and they deserve the freedom and autonomy to act on their own. They long for coworkers that are capable of holding on to their minds the idea that team-player and self-management are not antonyms. Don’t wait for permission, just state what you’re going to do, evaluate any given feedback from your perspective and expertise, and then do it!
Their Stack
Their core borrows some features from Clean Code / Hexagonal architecture and is drifting from a classic Rails backend towards a modular monolith architecture, aiming at providing the operational simplicity of a monorepo with the flexibility and isolation provided by a multi-component system.
Right now we have multiple APIs to serve our native apps and web clients, with a rapidly growing amount of custom integrations. Additionally, they have connections with different financial systems to provide real-time money movements.
You will help design and build APIs for their new products as we keep expanding our services.
Their Practices
They have cherry-picked -pun intended-practices and rituals from Scrum, Kanban, and other methodologies with a principle of simplicity in mind and following what has worked for us in previous projects and experiences. They have a per-team daily meeting, biweekly all-hands, and project/integration-related meetings on an as-needed basis. They are constantly iterating our processes, and you are welcome to help their make them better.
Continuous integration and delivery are at the core of what they do in the dev team (both backend and mobile) and they have built some custom pipelines to run everything as smoothly and automatically as possible.
When it comes to communication, their current size allows them to err on the side of oversharing, and everyone in Devengo is encouraged to provide feedback and to contact any other person in the company whenever it seems appropriate. They currently use Slack and communication is mostly async.
When will you work?
Devengo has a flexible schedule to let team members reconcile their commitments and responsibilities with their work, so if you are an early bird and want to put a few hours before bringing the kids to school, great! If you are more of a night owl and feel most productive in the silence of the night, excellent too! You will have autonomy and flexibility to adapt your working day to your personal life.
There is still, however, the need for some sync time and a daily meeting just after lunch (14:00-15:00 CEST), so we ask people to be available at least between 12:00 and 16:00. That said, currently, the period where people is available ranges usually from 06:00 to 21:00.
Working day
Full-time
Holidays
22 days
Working hours
FlexibleWhere will you work?
Remote
This position is 100% remote, but we are currently searching for candidates to be in a UTC ±2 hours timezone to make easy the scheduling of meetings or any other commitment that involves other members of the team.
If you are in that range, as long as you are sure you have a good connection, it doesn't matter where you are working from.
We have quarterly offsites that involve physical meetups—they are a great moment to interact with the rest of the team!
Who will you work with?
Team
Alberto Molpeceres (Founder) Tech scene veteran with more than 1,000 battles behind him. Founder of Besepa, developer, businessman, bank expert… Alberto is our swiss army knife, capable of wearing a million hats with care and dedication.
Fernando Cabello-Astolfi (Founder) After selling Aplazame, Fernando returns to the fight with another company aiming at revolutionizing the world of Fintech.
Marisa Marín (CPO) Marisa has been facing challenges in digital products for more than 14 years. She takes care of the product and the process, and whenever possible, dedicates time to teaching and mentoring. A gem in the team from which the most constructive feedback will come out!
Aitor García (CTO) After more than 20 years of shipping software, Aitor is now helping Devengo provide the best technical solution on our market. Always doing everything possible to help the dev team move forward, Aitor will be collaborating with you to find solutions to the technical challenges that we constantly face in Devengo.
Ivan Guardado (Backend Lead) After cofounding Erasmusu and leading teams in Audiense and Inditex, Ivan joined Devengo and has rapidly become instrumental in the development of a solid base for our tech infrastructure and a key element of the tech team.
What are they asking for?
Devengo is looking for someone who has a senior perspective on software development. This perspective does not necessarily require a specific number of years but experience designing and developing APIs, knowing when to take pragmatic tradeoffs and the conviction that commercial software development is a team game where maintainability is critical.
Here are some of the requirements that you should meet:
- You can communicate well in English, both orally and in writing. Although most tech meetings are conducted in Spanish, English is used for any writing documentation and in the peer review process.
- You have a good understanding of software principles. You'll work with Ruby, but can bring experience in other languages.
- You understand and have already implemented TDD or best practices such as SOLID principles, design patterns, testing...
- You have experience deploying applications in production environments.
- You have used CI/CD pipelines for continuous integration and deployment.
- You understand the importance of having a solid test suite and are willing to write many tests.
- You can communicate your arguments clearly and especially listen to others.
- You are self-motivated, able to work with little supervision and know how to get things done, keeping yourself organized and focused.
On the purely technical side our must-have list for dev knowledge is short and sweet:
- +4 of experience developing backend software (Ruby, Python, JS, PHP, Java, Go, or any mainstream language)
- A focus on code quality driven by automated testing.
- Experience designing and using relational databases.
- Experience creating and consuming REST APIs.
- A good enough level of written and spoken English (all technical work is done in this language).
Our nice-to-have list is slightly more specialized:
- Hexagonal/Clean architecture and DDD.
- Experience in Ruby/Rails.
- Experience on the most common AWS services (S3, EC, Cloudfront, etc.)
- Experience using Continuous Integration (currently using Travis)
- Experience in fintech.
Technologies
No stack
They are looking for professionals who have the necessary knowledge to perform the functions of their position regardless of the technology used.
This would be good
Ruby on Rails
Intermediate 
Ruby
Intermediate 
PostgreSQL
Intermediate 
AWS
Intermediate
Other skills
Non-negotiable
Adaptability to change
Good written communication
Listening ability
Proactivity
Team player
This would be good
Good verbal communication
Autonomy in learning
What are they offering?
They offer fair, competitive, and transparent pay. The total annual compensation range for this position (including salary and phantom equity) is up to 50K€. We will look at factors like your experience to determine the final offer.
Perks
Dynamics and teambuilding events
What the FAQ?
Sí, pero siempre que te encuentres en un timezone cerca con (UTC +- 2)
Normalmente, su proceso de selección consta de 3 fases: entrevista cultural, prueba técnica y charla con los fundadores.
No, de hecho no tienen oficina :) Sí que existen unos offsites cada quarter para poder interactuar presencialmente con el resto del equipo.