About Flywire and what they do
Flywire is about a 10 year old company. We are a FinTech company focusing on money move. And so a lot of FinTech companies do focus on things like payments and credit cards, we're higher level than that we focus on actually moving money for education, healthcare, b2b and high end travel. And so it's a way for us to actually help facilitate it easily facilitate money moves across the world, at a lower cost with much more transparency.
Details on Flywire's engineering team
Right now we're about 225. Folks in the engineering team globally, that's between Tel Aviv, Cluj Romania, Valencia, and here in North America. And each one of the respective regions focuses on a separate area within the business. We also have different roles beyond engineers, we have program management, we have site reliability for SRS, QA, and, and product and UI UX as well.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
I mentioned before that we're vertical focused, we're also core platform. So we build in a month, one to many relationship across the ecosystem. I'd say there's several big projects of this year. First and foremost, we have heavy effort and emphasis on site reliability, and scaling. We've seen monumental growth across the organization. So our investments in the tools and tooling we use at Amazon, in our deployment process, that's a pretty big one. Moving on to education, the way we're moving money, not only for educational payments, like paying your university, but also creating new systems that allow students who are moving abroad, to have an easy access to funds from friends and family. So that's a really exciting one, that's a game changer for us, because that increases the infinity by which a student uses Flywire that's really quite exciting. And then what we're doing in the b2b space, this is a relatively new focus for us, I call it the startup inside the startup. And that is to help facilitate global payments for companies that disperse and so you think of a company that uses an ERP system to pay their suppliers and vendors and subcontractors. Today, that's still done a lot by cheque. And they actually have people that do it and so heavily manual process. But using that same core platform and technology that we have, we've built Flywire around, we're actually refocusing it and tying into Oracle, NetSuite, PeopleSoft and Salesforce and other applications. So that's it is a highly explosive area of the business. And it's super exciting, because every day is a little different working with those clients out there and their use cases. And so specifically, on this one, we're seeing that area just sort of explode as far as different ways of using the system, and it's very exciting.
Details on the tech stack
So we are a full microservice platform set of platforms. We've done acquisitions over the last several years. And so we use Ruby on some stacks in Java and others out there. But we're all fully Amazon microservice based. We're all containerized in Docker. And we actually have our own container management system that we've built in house to help facilitate this. So can do hundreds of deployments throughout the day. We use some technology from Google around AI and ML. So it really is is just a hodgepodge of different really exciting pieces of tech in the organization. We find our engineers are incredibly well versed. And if you don't know the tech, when you come here, we spent a lot of time educating our teams and how to use it and how to solve problems.
What to expect during the interview process
Might this is a general philosophy we have across the organization in the technology sector is that we try to focus on hiring good people, people who are interested in solving problems. That's first and foremost, as we bring people in for interviews on the technology side to it. It's not about being fully aligned with a particular language or particular style. It's about trying to find someone that we can invest in. And so during the interview process, we look for what you've done in the past, what your passions are, what your propensity to learn new technologies are. We also focus on understanding you do can you work in an environment that has sometimes an ambiguous request, not everything is laid out by product, a lot of the latitude and freedom we have an engineering is granted to us by an idea, and we solve those ideas. So I think during the interview process for most, they go through it and we're looking for people and culture fit first. Are you the right person? Do you have the right alignment to it? You know, this is about hiring good people. We spent a lot of time working Other, there is a coding test that goes through it. And we actually want to do some shadowing. So we do invest in our folks to see how they solve problems, how they break things down, we'll be very specific, in certain circumstances, will hire people who don't have Ruby experience, or certain degrees of job experience. But they there, they've got the aspect of willingness to learn, you know, maybe they know C, Objective C, maybe there was something else out there. And, and for us, an engineer is not just a person who knows a language, it's a person who knows how to solve problems, the language or languages just come along for the ride. So it is a pretty exciting process. We're very thorough, we want to make sure it works for us, and it works for the candidates coming into it. And the last piece I'll say is, over the last few years, we've changed the attitude route, we try not to hire just for team we hire for the company, we hire for the department, knowing full well that you may spend 810 12 months working on a particular project and then raise your hand and say I want to go work on healthcare, or I want to go work on the b2b space, or I want to work and travel out there. So we try to hire across regions. It's also just not about hiring, let's say just in Valencia, a lot of our projects have cross a cross-team collaboration to it, which is exciting for a lot of folks, especially people to work with folks in different cultures. And it's really quite challenging in a very good way.
Why now is the ideal time to join
So as I mentioned before, I've been with Flywire for two years. And I've worked at a lot of different organizations and well says Flywire looks to invest. When you come on as a new employee. There's a two week onboarding process where you're going to get firsthand knowledge of every different department, how it works, what goes on. And the key here is that you can build understanding and empathy about what your role is and how it impacts not only just the customers but other flatmates. And that's actually our term for coworkers, flatmates. So I think it's a really good time. It's a very collaborative environment, it's very challenging. We do move very quickly. Again, we're moving money. So we've got to make sure we do it fast, accurately audible. And we do it right. And so it can be a great opportunity for someone who's really looking to explode your career. And it's actually very satisfying. At the end of the day, you can say, I help this segment of customers, whether they be students, or people pay their medical bills, or organizations pay their invoices. So it's really quite rewarding across the organization. I will also say our culture in general, is very diverse. It's, it's very inclusive, and it's really encompassing. It's I've been with the company for this period of time, and my wife has turned to me and said, This is the happiest you've ever been. You've got great friends, you've got great challenges. Some days are stressful, but at the end of the day, I just keep coming back for it and I just see how this ripples across my organization as well. So good people build good software.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
