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Working as a developer at Rollee

Agile principles, grooming, scalability - dive into the daily life of Rollee's developers and engineers.

Thomas Godart
Thomas Godart
May 31, 2022
3 min read
Working as a developer at Rollee

As an API-based company, Rollee relies heavily on its talented developers to deliver a high-quality, reliable product to its customers: the financial institutions that want to upgrade their decision-making tools and be more inclusive in their decisions.

Feedback and Ownership are the heart of our progress
from the very beginning.

Our customers are giving us the most valuable feedback: they help us deliver a better product and improve our internal working environment. They make us understand what they need, and we see them as a valuable resource, especially in our early-stage development. 

Our developers own their topics: we managed to grow from a functional but non-scalable V1 to a scalable V2 thanks to new people joining the team and taking full responsibility & ownership of their scope. 

Rollee is a remote-first company (meaning that there is no actual headquarters office). This set-up has been helping from Day 1 to set up the right rituals, habits and tools to keep all developers aligned with the vision and expectations of the founders without the dependencies of one single workplace.

How is the tech team managing the everyday-business? What tools are they using at Rollee? What skills are you expected to have? And which one can you develop? How are we making sure that our product is working in a reliable, safe and fast way? 

Keep reading to get all the answers.

What profiles are we looking for?

We are specifically looking for Data Engineers and Backend Engineers to help us build the best API for more inclusive access to financial products. No specific location required - as a remote-first company, you can work from anywhere as long as you have a strong internet connection. A strong understanding of the programmation in Golang is expected. More generally how to organize the code in a modular and testable way is a big plus.

What does the day-to-day look like? 

The typical day starts with reviewing all merge requests of the past day. Then we continue with a stand-up meeting to share our daily goals. We then continue with several meetings to define task priorities and the road map.

What is Rollee’s culture?

Developers build software based on custom API to solve many problems in the management and transformation of data. SOLID principles are the base of the coding philosophy. We also apply Agile principles to adapt to changes and deliver the right item at the right time. It is highly valued to be a force of proposal of new ideas - as a startup, every developer is a part of the solution and welcomed (and expected) to share their expertise.

What technical skills can a developer hope to develop while working at Rollee?

When joining Rollee, you can expect to work on very challenging projects and acquire strong development skills in order to solve problems regarding the management of complex data. The skills acquired will concern good practices following the SOLID principles, such as modularity of the code, usage of interfaces to abstract dependencies, and writing integration tests.

The tools used by our developers are centered around 2 topics:

  1. Delivering the tech 
  2. With tools like Golang, PostgreSQL, Ubuntu, Git and Gorm, our developers are equipped to deliver high-quality work
  3. Communication about the tech
  4. To share advancements, blockers, milestones and more in a simple asynchronous way, our developers use Notion, Asana and Slack. 

How are we making sure that our tech is working?

To avoid the critical situation of being blocked into the workflow, we have committed to assigning to every developer at any time:

  • at least 3 tickets in total,
  • at least 1 ticket of any difficulty level (to avoid receiving 3 very difficult tickets)
  • this, in order to always allow everyone to switch to another topic, when the first one needs more thinking

When a ticket takes more than two days, it's groomed again. Usually, a small ticket takes half a day or less, an average ticket takes a day, and a large ticket takes two days. More significant topics are split into several tickets.

If you have read until here, you might be interested in joining our fantastic team and joining the adventure for inclusive finance. Drop us an email or reach out on Linkedin.