Devengo is a startup focused on a simple but ambitious mission: make finance a fairer place. Founded by well-known fintech players Fernando Cabello-Astolfi and Alberto Molpeceres our first product is an innovative social benefit that allows workers to collect their earned wages in real-time. Your money, when you need it.
Economists identify¹ three main challenges any person and household must face to reach a sustainable level of financial wellness: having sufficient and stable income, maintaining an economic-financial balance that limits problems of overindebtedness and avoiding severe poverty.
The last two challenges are the most pressing ones as they have an immediate effect on the material living conditions of the population and they compound over time sinking the households' economies further and further.
In Spain almost 6 out of 10 people fail to save anything each month². The scenario for most of Europe (and the US!) is mostly the same. In some cases, the situation is even worse and households are in a situation of dissaving, kept afloat only thanks to their past savings and families:
This does not seem to be a temporary situation and has got worse over the last decade in most of Europe and especially in our first market, Spain:
Without any economic cushion at hand, even small unexpected expenses can turn into a crisis. With this service, we help workers manage any cashflow emergencies that may arise (oh no! car broke again?) protecting them from predatory alternatives in the short term while laying the foundation for long-term financial wellness.
At the same time, we help the companies, by increasing retention, boosting productivity (it feels good to be able to focus without worrying about money every second!), and everything without any extra costs, or changes in the company's treasury cycle.
But our vision goes much further than this first step of opening the access to real-time salary 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 people, and kick some asses in the process.
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 have connections with different financial systems to provide real-time money movements.
You will help design and build APIs for our new products as we keep expanding our services. Starting from our focus on salary advance, we aim to be the best partner for embeddable fintech technology, and therefore a very important part of our work in the dev team is to provide world-class integrations for our partners, providers, and large accounts while maintaining these custom extensions isolated from our core.
We have cherry-picked -pun intended- practices and rituals from Scrum, Kanban, and other methodologies with a principle of simplicity in mind 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 make them better.
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.
When it comes to 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 mostly async.
All the Devengo team is currently based in Spain. This position is 100% remote and as long as you keep a ~4-hour overlap with the rest of the team you can adjust your time as you want (we will consider people in other time zones that are +-2 hours from Spain, sorry!).
Alberto Molpeceres (Founder) Tech scene veteran with more than 1,000 battles behind him. Founder of Besepa, developer, businessman, bank expert… Alberto is our swiss army knife, capable of wearing a million hats with care and dedication.
Fernando Cabello-Astolfi (Founder) After selling Aplazame, Fernando returns to the fight with another company aiming at revolutionizing the world of Fintech.
Marisa Marín (CPO) Marisa has been facing challenges in digital products for more than 14 years. She takes care of the product and the process, and whenever possible, dedicates time to teaching and mentoring. A gem in the team from which the most constructive feedback will come out!
Aitor García (CTO) After more than 20 years of shipping software, Aitor is now helping Devengo provide the best technical solution on our market. Always doing everything possible to help the dev team move forward, Aitor will be collaborating with you to find solutions to the technical challenges that we constantly face in Devengo.
Ivan Guardado (Backend Lead) After cofounding Erasmusu and leading teams in Audiense and Inditex, Ivan joined Devengo and has rapidly become instrumental in the development of a solid base for our tech infrastructure and a key element of the tech team.
Juan Francisco Nicolás Gea (Backend Senior) Juanfra has worked in some very well-known companies in the last years (Erasmusu, Personio, Jeff) and now has joined Devengo to contribute his experience to make a better financial world. His rigorous, no-nonsense development mindset fits perfectly with our engineering culture.
The first step to do any substantial work is to establish 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 are aware 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 on our work, the way everything is taken care of down to the smallest detail, with impressive thoroughness, effectiveness, and rigor.
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 in a pragmatic way.
Every time Devengo interacts with the world we should hold ourselves to the highest standards. We will methodically destruct the expectation of “just another company” when it comes to candor. 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 neighbors or friends. We will not able to always say yes but we 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 that are 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.
On the purely technical side our must-have list for dev knowledge is short and sweet:
- +4 of experience developing backend software (Ruby, Python, JS, PHP, Java, Go, or any mainstream language)
- A focus on code quality driven by automated testing.
- Experience designing and using relational databases.
- Experience creating and consuming REST APIs.
- A good enough level of written and spoken English (all technical work is done in this language).
Our nice-to-have list is slightly more specialized:
- Hexagonal/Clean architecture and DDD.
- Experience in Ruby/Rails.
- Experience on the most common AWS services (S3, EC, Cloudfront, etc.)
- Experience using Continuous Integration (currently using Travis)
- Experience building integrations in a B2B2C context.
- Experience in fintech.
We offer fair, competitive, and transparent pay. The total annual compensation range for this position (including salary and phantom equity) is up to 50K€. We will look at factors like your experience to determine the final offer.
Just send us an email to [email protected] telling us who you are and why are you interested in this offer.
[¹]"Economic and material welfare", Octubre 2018 Social Observatory of “la Caixa” https://observatoriosociallacaixa.org/documents/22890/135153/iBEM_Eng_October_digital.pdf/25106ba1-8133-a362-4af2-c4a0193c481d ↩
[²]"Las pensiones y los hábitos de ahorro en España", Octubre 2014 BBVA https://www.jubilaciondefuturo.es/recursos/doc/pensiones/20131003/posts/encuesta-las-pensiones-y-los-habitos-de-ahorro-en-espana-2014.pdf ↩