As we continue looking for more passionate professionals for the growing crew of our partner Xempus, we took the opportunity to learn and share with you more about their culture and what they are working on from Marina Petrova, a Principal Software Engineer at their German office. Read what she shared with us:
Hello Marina, please give us some information about your background. Who are you and what are you doing at Xempus?
I started my career as a full-stack developer in Kyiv, where I graduated with a master’s degree in computer science. For more than 10 years, I’ve been passionate about providing reliable solutions for complex problems on the backend. Since 2017 I’ve been working in a great team of professionals at Xempus as Backend Software Engineer.
Tell us a bit about Xempus? How would you describe the company in a few sentences?
Xempus is an exciting place to work. From start-up to a ‘scale-up’, we’ve managed to keep the feeling of being one big cross-functional team. We don’t work together between departments on a daily basis, but we are close.
Our four values at Xempus are openness, creative freedom, team spirit, and entrepreneurship. And I find it amazing that those four values are not just terms on our website but values we all live and work by every day.
From a technical perspective, what are the most challenging projects the company is working on?
We are providing several products around corporate pension plans for multiple stakeholders such as employers, agents, employees and insurance companies on one fully digital platform. We are:
- providing business logic once on the platform while providing a better user experience with the same to a similar look and feel for each stakeholder group, which requires us to use the same design system and similar UX flows in all the products;
- reducing the implementation and maintenance cost by migrating some of the existing instances of the product to a single multitenant and multi-insurer solution;
- improving the reliability of the system by standardizing process flows across the insurers;
- making multi-component integrations using micro-frontends use the cross-product functionality;
- unifying the product-based data models into one coherent platform-wide data model using event-sourcing;
- accelerating customer deliveries by scaling up the system faster.
What’s the tech stack currently used in Xempus?
The platform look unification is done using Vue.JS on the frontend. On the backend, however, the solutions are implemented using different technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Java and C# .NET Core. Recently we started using Kotlin as we found it to be the best-suited tool for a new data analytics project. Other tools worth mentioning are Kafka, which we use for the cross-platform event-sourced communication and Postgres for the databases. Most of our platform services run in Docker containers orchestrated by Kubernetes.
We’re now recruiting the first members of the software development team in Bulgaria. What kind of people do you see in these positions?
We look for curious and creative minds, fast thinkers and team players. At the moment, we have seven local engineering teams in Germany with successfully integrated remote-working colleagues. When hiring new colleagues and integrating them into the teams, it is very important for us to keep this safe environment we created. At Xempus, you are encouraged to question the decisions and make your own suggestions. We admit failures and learn from them, growing as a professional. Although we have a very good and supportive onboarding process, we are looking rather for experienced engineers.
What makes it great being part of Xempus?
First: what we are doing is really helping the community. Xempus products simplify the corporate life insurance processes, and therefore more people will have more money when they retire. They make it significantly easier and digital for employers and employees in Germany to take care of their future and invest effectively in it. You can work on projects that have a great impact on people‘s lives for the better.
Second: Our cultural values and our technical challenges make each day at Xempus an interesting and often also challenging day.
Did we catch your attention? Marina’s team needs more bright and brave people to help them continue developing outstanding software products. Should you recognize yourself in here, make sure to explore the career opportunities for the Xempus team at Questers and apply.