WHAT WE’RE BUILDING

We’re building the technology of the future for sharing human experiences that will enable 10 million students to make better decisions. The technology developed by Unibuddy engineers impacts the lives of prospective students across the world by helping them decide where and what to study so that they can fulfill their limitless potential.

Our existing product suite is used by different stakeholders including universities, students and prospective students. Some of our products include:

• embeddable widgets with chat and blogging functionality
• complex dashboards that provide insights to universities and allow them to manage their students and conversations
• machine learning (NLP) models
• real time “live event” applications
• engaging mobile apps

This is just the tip of the iceberg as our roadmap ahead will bring even better ways for people to share human experiences across Unibuddy products.

WHO WE ARE

We’re a group of highly motivated and talented engineers coming from all parts of the world! Our team consists of people from UK, India, Greece, Cyprus, France, Croatia and South Africa. Together, we have over 85 years of experience from small startups to large multinationals like Microsoft. While we’re not building a world-class peer-to-peer technology product we are involved in various activities like mountain biking, music producing, snorkelling, playing the piano, sailing, and gaming online!

HOW WE THINK

We're a band of builders and tinkerers. We’re never satisfied with good enough. We’re always pushing boundaries because we believe that standing still is a remarkable formula for going backward (especially in a fast-moving industry like software engineering!).

How can we make this UI faster? How can we optimise this database query? How can we reduce our CI/CD time? These are some of the types of questions we love diving into as Unibuddy Engineers. From GraphQL, to Design Systems to automated serverless Lambda deployments - engineering quality and innovation is an important cornerstone of the Engineering team.

WHAT WE VALUE AS ENGINEERS

1. Quality at a sustainable pace
2. Investing in constant learning
3. Collaborating in a safe space
4. Value the destination, enjoy the journey
5. Ownership and initiative

Do those speak to you? Then Unibuddy could be the perfect fit. Our engineering structure is flat and we encourage maximising team input and leading by consensus. The 5 titles above are our engineering philosophies and values that we came up with as a team. You can read more about how we came up with them and what they mean in detail over here.

OUR TEAM STRUCTURE

Unibuddy Engineering is split across two tribes in London (UK) and Bangalore (India). We work in nimble, self-organising squads that consist of 4 to 6 engineers, a Product Owner and an Agile Coach.

Each squad focuses on a product area and has full ownership of that area. Specialist Chapters (front end, back end etc) cut across squads horizontally to provide technical leadership and guidance.

In London, we also have our specialist Data Science squad tasked with extracting maximum value from our data through machine learning as well as our Platform squad which specialises in DevOps, security, high-level architecture, and other infrastructure-related concerns.

HOW WE WORK

We like to pair program, collaborate, whiteboard together, extensively review each other’s code and debate different approaches in engineering design sessions! Every engineer thinks about quality and optimisation. We expect great test coverage and good documentation. We value easy-to-read code.

Most engineers are full-stack engineers but everyone has their favourite part of the stack. We encourage people to become T-shaped: having a broad understanding and dabbling across the stack (base of the T) while developing a deep, specialist knowledge in one part of the stack (e.g. React, Python or MongoDB for example)

We work in two week sprints managed on Jira. We groom user stories in weekly product refinement sessions. Daily standups, sprint reviews/planning and sprint retrospectives are religiously conducted.

Engineers pick issues from the backlog to commit to for the sprint. Each engineer is responsible for getting their code into review and then QA. Once QA is approved, it’s also the responsibility of the engineer to take it to staging and then live. All tests and deployments are automated on our CI/CD system so we ship multiple times a day in small increments (user stories).