What It’s Like Working For Europe’s Fastest Growing Company

My humble workstation

It’s true, SumUp was named the fastest growing European company for 2018 by Inc. magazine after growing it’s revenue by 14,368% since 2015.

Following this achievement, I thought I’d document what it feels like to work at such a company.

It’s awesome.

Work & Impact

Working for SumUp has been a real pleasure since the very start. I joined June, 2017 in our now old Sofia office in Serdika Center. I started working on the platform from day 1 and saw my very first line of code go live 10 days later. This was unbelievable for me, as it was my first ever Software Engineering job!

I am extremely grateful I was not given some pointless intern project that was never destined to see the light of day but rather keep the person occupied.

This is one of the main reasons why I love working at this company — your work has real impact that you can see. I have personally shipped close to 16k lines of Ruby code for my short stay of ~7 months which is insane for a junior developer!

I’ve read and heard numerous horror stories of how people at big enterprises work for months on end on some internal system hidden deep down in the architecture. When their code is released into the wild after months of the waterfall process, they might not be able to even tell the difference it has made.

At SumUp, we follow an agile-ish methodology where we release code to production every week. Our teams are split by product domain, where each one develops a certain part of the system. We made a total of 51 releases in 2017! This is what I believe helped us grow so quickly.

Even now, we feel this weekly “monolithic” release is slowing us down substantially. As such, we are currently moving to a totally independent release schedule, where each product team can release at any day and time they see fit! Every team will be responsible for their own changes and fixing anything that goes wrong. You could say we are embracing the fail-fast culture.

Culture

Talking about culture, this is where our company really thrives. We have a flat hierarchy where everybody is treated equally. My problems and uncertainties are given attention even though they might not seem as important as those of a senior member.

Another thing is the down-to-earthness of everybody — I hang out with my “higher-ups” like I do with everybody else. Even after growing to over 800 people — our founders frequently visit our office and always take their time to greet and talk to everybody.

Environment

This crazy growth might indicate otherwise but we are fairly relaxed. There is no external pressure to produce results. Everybody knows what he/she must do and is intrinsically motivated to help achieve our mission of becoming the first ever global card acceptance brand while empowering small merchants.

In regards to work-life balance, we’re pretty well off. We do not do overtime. This is due to our approach of working smart, not only hard. In fact, our last two quarters’ prevailing motto was “Brain Over Muscle”, encouraging us to optimize the way we work instead of simply throwing more (hours, money, people, etc.) at a problem.

I don’t know if we can be classified as a start-up, but I can very much still feel the spirit. In fact, SumUp’s environment and spirit were the top positive results from a recent internal NPS survey.

Care

And yes, we do surveys and quarterly retrospective sessions. These (and more) are initiatives that aim to figure out what we’re lacking and eliminate problems that have arisen.

You can tell the company cares about and values its members. We are given access to the best software tools, hardware, furniture (ergonomic chairs are a blessing) available on the market plus a budget for attending tech conferences.

On top of that, every Friday we have a lunch-and-learn session and hack-time! The former is a company-sponsored lunch paired with an educational video/presentation and the latter is time dedicated to developing personal projects/improving ourselves.

Family

Even though we are a global organization with offices over the world, we still feel close to each other. Our company tries hard to bring us together as frequently as practical.

As I’m writing this, Gabriel from the Brazilian office is sitting at the desk left of me. He came to visit Sofia for a week and is going to Berlin afterwards. It is great to frequently meet with people from the other side of the world!

Apart from office visits, we have other events which bring our diverse team together.

Most of our tech team and a big chandelier in the castle

Our development team hosts two internal hackathons every year.

Working together with people from different offices you rarely meet on innovative projects is always a blast.

Our last hackathon was especially interesting, as it was hosted in a castle in the small German village of Beesenstedt.

Fun events are not only limited to our tech team though. We recently had an amazing two-day ski trip to a holiday resort in Bulgaria. It was jam-packed, more than 200 people attended!

Shortcomings

It can’t be all sunshine and rainbows, of course. Fast growth is as much as a hurdle as it is a blessing because it stress tests your organization to the maximum.

As a rapidly expanding organization we inevitably suffer from some technical debt and find it challenging to address it thoroughly when there is a need to roll out new features.

Another challenge we face is onboarding new people. When most of our infrastructure was built, there was not enough time nor incentive to thoroughly document how everything works. As such, the first few months of a fresh starter are accompanied by a steep learning curve. I experienced this myself — I had to constantly seek guidance and ask (probably annoying) questions to the more senior people. This initially hindered my motivation and productivity. You need to be self-driven, autonomous and responsible to truly thrive here, but once you are you can move mountains.

Regardless, what’s important is that this is all being addressed and will be taken care of eventually.

These were my personal thoughts about working at this dynamic, fast-paced company. I thought it would be good to share what kind of work environments exist here in Europe and what people might be missing out on. I hope I’ve managed to convey my honest feelings on what it’s like day to day here.

And if by chance you’re interested in working for Europe’s fastest growing company — we are hiring across the board.

Feel free to contact me for further information.