The Structure of the Tech Team

• Currently 7 software engineers, including CTO.
• All full-stack, no frontend/backend separation due to the nature of our tech stack.
• We develop features solely for our own product, not for external parties.
• Our feature development is data driven with user behaviour metrics, A/B tests and other data evaluation pipelines.
• We take the need for refactorings and proper architecture seriously.
• We do not have on-call rotation, since our infrastructure is built in a way that makes it unnecessary. No “this is fine”.
• The tech team and other product-related team members are located in the Berlin area. The split between our office and home-office varies per person.
• English is our primary language for the codebase and tech-related things, e.g. commits and pull requests. Other communication at Afilio is mostly German. We’re open to helping you learn if needed.

Our Stack

• A single codebase, no frontend/backend split, instead focus on proper layers.
• We only use TypeScript. However, I would call our codebase much more sane than most codebases in the JS ecosystem. I imported many principles from the Go ecosystem.
• For the user interface we use a heavily customised Vue.js 3 (with composition API) and Vuetify. For example our templates are fully type-checked, including generic components. We’re step by step moving towards replacing Vue.js entirely with a much simpler implementation that still can handle all of our user interfaces. We’re planning to eventually open source this.
• Primary database: Firestore. It integrates very nicely with Vue, allowing us to have data projections from the database right into the user interface. No state inconsistency possible! We use a concept we call “parsers” to have strong type guarantees and to enable data layout flexibility over time.
• We have adopted Temporal to make it much easier to implement long-running business logic and to boost reliability.
• We use the Google Cloud Platform for our infrastructure, primarily Cloud Run and a tiny Kubernetes cluster.
• We use Cloudflare and make heavy use of Cloudflare Workers.
• We have a strong focus on observability and data driven decision making. We do a lot of A/B tests. Our tool of choice in this area is Amplitude (currently looking into switching to PostHog), with the addition of some Big Query processing for BI reports.

Our list of must-reads that influence how we work in Tech

• The Agile Manifesto
• Code is run more than read
• Simple Made Easy
• Heuristics for Effective Software Development / Organizations
• 5 Software Engineering Foot-guns
• The Wrong Abstraction
• Refactoring
• Code Reviews for Authors
• Code Reviews for Reviewers
• Parse, don’t validate

How does the whole company work?

• We use a system of roles and responsibilities instead of job positions
• We use our own version of Objectives and Key Results for planning and coordination, a system initially created by Intel and heavily used by Google
• We strive for using a simplified version of the advice process for most decisions we make to empower everyone
• We especially want to empower our team to take ownership of their own working hours, for example we have a rule that only you yourself are allowed to put your own name next to a Key Result during planning. No one just tells you what to work on.
• We have internal transparency of all salaries and are continuously improving on how to handle salaries. I am also open to sharing them during the interview, just ask.
• Here is a list of inspirations that we collected that inspire our team culture for the whole company:
  Teamkultur: Was uns inspiriert
• There is also an About Us and a Team page on our website

Tech Hiring Process

• Introductory call with me (Richard, CTO)
• Architecture challenge with me (no coding, I’m looking for problem solving and communication skills)
• Optional second call with Albert (Product Engineering Lead)
• Casual team-fit call, including people outside of the tech team
• Done!