Engineering Culture

Andy Hill, VP of Engineering.

 development technology ipad

At Bink we are building a bank grade solution by applying modern thinking to product development and technology, and best of all, we are building something which has never been done before. We must move fast carefully, whilst operating within the constraints required to work with our bank and merchant partners.

To achieve this, our approach is to retain as much control over our solution and the technology as possible; this gives us greater speed, flexibility, and quality. Our engineering team is 40 strong and growing.

Central to our success is building a culture we can all be proud of. This not only makes Bink an enjoyable and rewarding place to work, but it also gives us a tremendous advantage in retaining and recruiting top engineers. Culture is not about ping pong tables and free food, it’s about the core values and guidelines we use when we work together – it’s a living thing.

To maintain and evolve standards as we grow, it’s important to define a common view on what our engineering culture and principles are – this is the Bink engineering formula. This isn’t a final set of rules, but should act as a guide, continually evolving as we grow and learn.

Engineering Mission

To increase the speed, quality and agility of technology delivery and resilience for our customers.

Engineering Vision

To become the example of how to create innovative products in fintech.

Bink engineering formula

We embrace team flexibility, autonomy, self-improvement and self-organisation.

We are customer obsessed and we all know who is going to use our product and how they are going to use it. We take pride in our product being the best it can be.

Quality is at the heart of everything we do – from design, through to implementation and continued support in production.

Security of the data we hold, and Bink’s IP is fundamental and built into everything we do. Security risks and incidents are called out immediately and without retribution, so we improve together.

Transparency is in everything we do, whether internally or externally through blogs, contributing to open source, or calling our production issues and incidents immediately.

We all want to take pride in what we do, so we leave the codebase better than we found it. Code should be written to be read and easily debugged. Any engineer can propose a change to any part of our codebase, and we’re always encouraged to make things better.

Technical debt can be a useful option to allow us to build and release faster, but we always endeavour to deliver the best strategic solution first. Any tech debt must be in a user story so it can be prioritised and, if needed, raised as a risk.

We want small, canary, incremental changes to lower risk of large deployments.

We automate repeated tasks, so we can focus on the fun stuff.

We embrace innovation by being open to new ideas and technologies and sharing them with the team.

Bink time is there for hackathons, to support self-improvement or just to try new things. This is one day per month for either solo or group activities to support self-improvement, try new technologies, or facilitate team building. This can either be saved up or used a day at a time.

We collaborate to support each other; this could be through training or just to unblock each other’s work – cross functionally.

We have respect for each other’s views, challenge solutions, and accept constructive feedback – we don’t blame individuals, we blame problems.

When making decisions, the whole team is listened to and once a decision is made, we move together and accept it was the right decision at the time.

We measure and constantly review how we work to drive continuous improvement and are openly critical of ourselves to improve.

We monitor everything in production to identify and resolve issues as fast as possible and give our customers the best experience.