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 our 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.
We have invested the last three years in discovering a thousand ways of making Salary Advance that don't work -to paraphrase Edison. We recently decided to collect all we have learned and pivot Devengo to laser-focus on the transformative technology we have mastered: instant payments.
We've 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.
We 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 we have had a front-row seat to this transformation, processing hundreds of thousands of operations and millions of euros for our salary advance customers. We 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 our vision goes much further than this first step of democratizing access to instant payments in Europe; we will soon launch in other non-EU areas, and to make this vision a reality, we need your help. We're looking for a Senior Backend Developer to join our team, embrace our vision, create some life-improving services for companies, and kick some asses in the process.
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:
The dust will start to settle.
You are a bona fide Devenger!
Our process loosely merges practices from Kanban and Scrum with a focus on the principles of Continuous Delivery. The 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 free to pick from the board what they want to work on if no other mate is already working on it. In the daily meeting, the team meets to provide status updates, discuss blockers and explain what's coming next.
The first step to doing any substantial work is establishing the common ground we all want to defend, the fundamental ideas about how Devengo does business we want to share. These are our key values:
Finesse is defined as "refinement and delicacy of performance, execution or artisanship". We know that there is a non-negligible number of companies out there that can do what we 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.
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 our resources, time, and energy to do it will be inevitably finite. It's our task to deal with this fact gracefully and pragmatically.
Every time Devengo interacts with the world, we should hold ourselves to the highest standards. We will methodically destroy the expectation of "just another company" when it comes to candour. 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, we will sweep them away and replace them with fairness and empathy. And our customers will never deserve or receive less help and understanding than our neighbours or friends. We cannot always say yes, but they will never fail to evaluate and lend a hand when possible.
Devengo employs great people, and they deserve the freedom and autonomy to act on their own. We long for coworkers 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.
Our 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, we connect with different financial systems to provide real-time money movements.
You will help design and build APIs for our new products as we expand our services.
As mentioned before, we have cherry-picked -pun intended- practices and rituals from Scrum, Kanban, and other methodologies with a principle of simplicity and following what has worked for us in previous projects and experiences. We have a per-team daily meeting, biweekly all-hands, and project/integration-related meetings on an as-needed basis. We are constantly iterating our processes, and you are welcome to help us improve them.
Continuous integration and delivery are at the core of what we do in the dev team (both backend and mobile), and we have built some custom pipelines to run everything as smoothly and automatically as possible.
Regarding communication, our current size allows us to err on the side of oversharing, and everyone in the company is encouraged to provide feedback and to contact any other person in the company whenever it seems appropriate. We currently use Slack, and communication is primarily async.
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 in 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.
This position is 100% remote. Still, 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!
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:
On the purely technical side, our must-have list for dev knowledge is short and sweet:
Our nice-to-have list is slightly more specialized: