We are a engineering-dominant team led by two technical founders.

Out of our 26 employees, about 22 have an engineering background and 18 of those are our software developers. We are currently transitioning to autonomous teams to give engineering teams control over which projects to accept. Usually, engineers support project managers when it comes to feature planning, or when it comes to what we can sell to the client. This mostly depends on the team, the project, and the client we are working with. (Some clients are more open than others to our suggestions. ;)

Besides that, both founders have a strong technical background. Stephan and Mathias are long-time friends who had a small company selling hardware and software to friends back in the mid-90's. They later went on to study software engineering at a university of applied sciences. During that time Stephan became very interested in the context of web development while Mathias was more focused on software generation techniques. They wanted to create a software generator for e-commerce applications, and bitExpert was born. These days bitExpert builds custom applications for our clients and helps bootstrapping products as well.

With passion and expertise, we transform our clients' ideas into business value by using state-of-art technology. We use PHP, Java, Angular, and ExtJS developing web applications. Docker is currently playing a very big role in development as well in our production environments. Regarding databases we like to use PostgreSQL with all it's latest features (e.g. JSON support), but also use MongoDB and Redis.

We embrace engineering from the top to the bottom.

Many companies claim to be engineering-driven, but few actually are. After much internal discussion, we agreed that the most salient attributes of Wealthfront’s culture exemplify how engineering-driven we are. It’s apparent in everything we do:

1. All decisions are made based on objective criteria. Engineers represent more than half our employees, and leadership empowers engineers to drive decisions and lead the culture for the entire company. That being said, this doesn’t mean tyrannical rule. Engineers at Wealthfront ensure the other functions feel empowered to contribute equally, encourage debate, and rely on data-driven standards for decision-making.
2. We organize teams to maximize performance. We believe the team owns the code, not individuals. To that end, scrum teams internally organize to deliver projects.
3. If it can be automated, we do it. We are dedicated to automating as much as possible, whether it’s software development or client-facing features. A main part of our mission is to eliminate the frustrating manual processes that plague traditional financial service companies and leads to increased client costs and fees. That’s why we are so invested in continuous deployment (see our Continuous Delivery section below in our profile!) and automated test infrastructure from server to mobile.

We don’t shy away from technical challenges.

Our product drive is backed by technical depth and quality. Making cryptocurrency simple for users requires us to do heavy lifting technically. Examples of our engineering challenges include:

• Interoperating with thousands of centralized and decentralized exchanges, crypto protocols, and blockchains
• Scaling our systems to handle users with millions of transactions per year
• Handling billions of data points for historical prices of cryptocurrencies with precision

We have continuous integration, unit tests with >80% coverage, and multiple daily automated deployments to production.

We’re building secure, robust, and scalable infrastructure while rapidly delivering features.

Our CTO, Kenan, has spent his entire career building early stage startups from the ground up. He has a strong focus on building infrastructure to scale and support an amazing user experience without compromising on security and speed. Kenan now brings this expertise to Point. As we build our engineering team, we’re committed to leveraging newer technologies to rapidly iterate and scale while solving complex problems. This gives us a competitive advantage over incumbents, since traditional financial services companies are known to run on mainframes and take many months and millions of dollars to build a single feature. For example, Wells Fargo spent $500M to develop their mobile app, while we have been able to build similar functionality in a third of the time for less than 1 percent of the cost.

When we think about solving problems, we consider more than just the technical implications of the implementation. We think deeply about how engineering can make the product deliver the best user experience by designing best in class APIs to correspond to our UX design. While there are certainly confines in which we need to operate, our team finds clever solutions to build around potential bottlenecks. Since we are in the financial services space, it’s very important for us to also maintain high availability and reliability. We are methodical in our approach to choosing the technology we want to leverage when we need to make major changes to the infrastructure.

In order to focus on our core competencies, we are deliberate about future proofing our technology throughout each iteration. For example, we leverage GraphQL as it enables us to create APIs at a much faster pace, has a self-documented API, is supported by large organizations who require reliability, enables us to test out the API in a “Playground” without having to set up a client, and allows for extensibility as we build out more functionality. These are the kinds of considerations we take into account when deciding which technology to adopt. We also evaluate the feasibility of maintaining the infrastructure with the small and nimble team we currently have.

We’re engineers building products for engineers.

One of the things we love about working at LaunchDarkly is that we are making life better for engineering teams around the globe. We have four engineering values:

• Always Be Flagging – be exemplary users of Feature Management to ship faster with less risk.
• Think Incrementally – we embrace the cumulative impact of small changes.
• Simple, Correct, and Fast – to achieve big things efficiently, we design for simplicity first.
• Invest in the Team – we are generous with our time, because we succeed or fail as a team.

We approach hard problems with an engineering mindset. We're not afraid of big challenges, which is why we invested heavily in a modern, distributed scalable delivery system, even when the company was small.

In order to focus on high-value problems, we build and deploy on AWS and make extensive use of platform capabilities like AWS Lambda and AWS Kinesis. We write all of our core services in Go, which strikes a great balance between performance and ease of development. All of this gives our customers the ability to control their software in product and make critical changes in situations when milliseconds matter. We work every day to give engineering teams just like ours new super-powers.

First and foremost, we are an engineering company. Engineers are the ambassadors of our company and community.

Engineers at Automattic drive our culture, and drive a variety of codebases and processes devoted to making the web a better place. WordPress websites power 34% of the websites on the internet and see over 162M unique visitors per month in the US alone; that’s a lot of opportunity to make an impact.

Distributed around the world and with varied backgrounds, interests, and expertise, our engineers are ambassadors of our company and community. They collaborate with the other roles at Automattic to define, implement, and improve the experience for our passionate and loyal customers.

As founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg discussed in a Techcrunch interview upon our announcement of raising $300M from a new partner in Salesforce Ventures, we don’t plan to change the roadmap of launching and constantly iterating our products.