Building a Unique Technology Team
At Walr, we are committed to building a truly unique tech team. We we want to avoid becoming a clone of those that have come before us and nurture real talent to deliver delight to our customers.
3 Core Principles to Building a Unique Tech Team
We are delighted to be accredited as a Great Place to Work®. It reflects the entire company’s dedication to creating a rewarding and inspiring working environment. For the tech team specifically, this award manifests itself in our active pursuit away from being another clone of today’s tech giants.
We want to ensure we have a team of senior developers with different backgrounds and experiences in one room, so we can foster a highly creative environment where everyone works together to build planet-scale data analysis.
To do this we seek out expertise in infrastructure, data modelling, low level data operations, mathematical statistics, microservices architecture, deployment pipelines and code optimization.
To nurture the expertise and knowledge within our team, we remain focused on three core principles, to:
- Be at the cutting edge of tech
- Provide the freedom to innovate
- Embrace failing fast
To Be At the Cutting Edge of Tech
We want to always be at the sharp edge. For us, innovation comes with investing a lot of time in thinking and exploring. We are always looking to improve our solutions and every decision is based on running at warp speed.
When we do data analysis, in terms of calculation time, our bar is always set at maximum double digits, in milliseconds – no matter the size of a dataset or number of variables. Reaching these numbers requires a lot of thought, to make sure we are utilizing our technology and supporting infrastructure to the absolute max. This core mathematical engine is the foundation of the entire platform.
Our engine has been through several technologies, starting with pure assembler code (used until 2010), to fully managed C#. It supports a documented query language that can generate hundreds of data tables in a few lines, including any statistical calculations, filters, and dynamically created variables.
The Freedom to Innovate
Being a developer is all about creativity. We love what we do and find the opportunity to express and explore our creativity incredibly rewarding.
We revel in innovation. We encourage all engineers to think outside the box and come up with creative solutions. Proving concepts and ideas is one of the greatest kickbacks.
We trust our employees to propel Walr forwards and believe in daily innovation. If an engineer comes up with a new idea or finds something that needs to be refactored, they can use our innovation board (a physical white board!) to write it down. We go through this board once a week as a team to talk through the items, validate them and check if they have any dependencies. We use Scrum planning to decide on the top items, keeping room for any innovative ideas that crop up. Ideas are always kept and revisited as part of our backlog maintenance.
Being in the same office has proven to be very successful for us, with lots of discussions and breakouts around the whiteboard. We try and spend three days together and then work from home when we need that extra focus for completing a consuming task.
While this is our current blueprint for creativity, flexibility remains a key value. Ultimately, we work around the needs of the team to maximize productivity.
Embracing Failing Fast
Being cloud-based has opened up endless possibilities in how we scale and maintain our latency (performance). We regularly try out new ideas, whether it is a new cloud service or data storage solution, or structuring code in a different way. We fail. We rebuild. We measure it again. We learn.
Failing is as important as winning and we do it together. Every Thursday we run demos on new concepts to validate, evaluate and share feedback to the group.
This collaboration is core to the success of our team. It puts us in a mindset of constant learning, so we can adapt, iterate, and take on new challenges to advance the technology forward.
We want to welcome you
We love what we do here at Walr and we can’t wait to welcome you. Are you as excited about tech as we are? Get in touch to see if there’s a position for you.
Ready to explore more?
Speak with us to see how Walr can work for you.
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