How would you explain Futurae to your friend in 3 sentences?
At Futurae, we focus on authenticating users online, whether from browsers, mobile phones or IoT devices. Security and Usability are at the heart of what we do, every day. Our growing team is hard at work shaping the future of online authentication by solving some of its toughest challenges and at the same time creating outstanding user experiences. Futurae was founded by ETH Zurich security researchers and business leaders (as an ETH spin-off) and offers a suite of modular multi-factor authentication technologies that provide a high degree of security, all the while never compromising on the user experience while protecting the user's privacy. With our products, we serve highly regulated companies, such as hospitals, eHealth companies, as well international companies in the financial services, education or public sector.
Futurae Technologies AG - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at Futurae
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
We get to choose our own hardware and software setup (IDE, OS), as long as it is in line with our technology stack and with the job at hand (for example, if you are an iOS engineer, you need a Mac). As Futurae is a security company, a small number of security policies are in place (for example, minimum password length, use of 2FA, and device encryption, to name a few) to keep your favorite setup secure.
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
We are a small company that wants to grow, which means that we have the opportunity to grow within the company, both from the perspective of our career and that of learning and experience. As the company grows, we are facing an increasing number of technical challenges, and each one of us has a direct impact on handling them. We choose the technologies that we use, whether it is something we know well, or we believe in and want to learn and try out.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
We try not to reinvent the wheel; if we can find a third party library/framework/system that we trust, we use it. However, when this is not possible (for instance Go is still immature in some aspects), we do write our own stuff — which sometimes can be fun!
🔍 Check out the active job openings at Futurae Technologies AG
👩‍💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
Futurae is built from the founders team up as an extremely diverse company, be it in terms of nationalities, gender, roles, and ideas. First and foremost, you need to feel comfortable. The key values at Futurae are: - Be honest, positive, and have fun. - Give credit and do not blame yourself or others. - Communicate with clarity, but always listen first. - Do “the right thing” and learn to say no. - Ask, teach, learn, and reflect. - Win as a team, lose as a team. - “I can’t” doesn’t exist. - Be inspired by good competition. - Be open for constant change, be flexible. On a day-by-day basis, these are reflected in a direct-feedback culture, where everyone’s word is heard and any feedback is valued.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
Our teams are small in size, and typically there is one person that leads a specific engineering area (e.g. one person is responsible for all things Mobile). However, we always work closely together, but also independently as much as possible. Our teams currently consist of a good mix of generalists and specialists, which gives us both flexibility and expertise.
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
Futurae embraces remote working from day one, as long as it’s compatible with the work at hand. New parents have time off from work, when the baby is born, and can continue working remotely for even longer, such that they can spend as many hours with the newborn as they wish.
What is your remote work policy?
As long as the job is done, with quality and speed, and without hindering others, all employees at Futurae can work remotely. It’s in one’s own responsibility to assess what’s best for the job at hand. Of course, in the office we also provide free coffee, beverages, and organize fun events: so it’s good to be around from time to time :).
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
We have adopted some principles from Agile; we have weekly meetings in which we discuss progress and planning, but every day we work closely together in order to adapt our planning quickly as quite frequently we deal with dynamic tasks. We try to keep our release cycles short and frequent.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
All employees have a yearly budget that they can allocate between conferences, books, and tools for their personal business growth. Hackathons are not so frequent, but happen throughout a year to solve a very specific issue or tackle a specific problem with quickly prototyping of a solution. Some of the output has become a core component of the Futurae product lineup!
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
We welcome contributions to the open-source community, as long as they are relevant to our work in Futurae. For instance, writing a tool that might be useful to our customers, or contributing a useful fix or feature to an open-source library that we use in our codebase.
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
You go ahead and buy it and get a reimbursement within the next quarter! Only requirement: the book should be in English!
đź’Ľ How does the interview process at Futurae look like?
We review your application. If we believe that your profile is interesting and a good match for the role we are looking for, we will arrange an introductory call. We will then invite you to a technical interview (either physical, or online) during which we mostly want to discuss and understand further your skills and expertise in the areas you have been working on, in relation with the technologies and tasks that you would have to tackle at Futurae. During the interview, we will also try to give you a good overview of what your responsibilities and day-to-day tasks at Futurae would involve. In some cases, following the technical interview, we may assign you a small programming/engineering task. We will also ask you to give us a reference of your choice (ex-employer, manager etc) whom we can contact and ask a few simple questions about your collaboration. Finally, we will invite you to meet the founders and the rest of the team (we will probably arrange a visit to our offices and lunch), and, if all goes well, we will make you an offer.
Got any questions?
🕵️‍♂️ Extra - insider interview with Ilias Rinis
Ilias Rinis agreed to share a personal opinion about working at Futurae. He is a Lead Engineer at Futurae and works there since over 3 years.
What are you currently working on at Futurae
I am currently working at Futurae as Lead Engineer, which means that I am involved (in more or less depth) in all things technical.
I am primarily leading all activities and development related to our main backend which implements our authentication-as-a-service platform, whether it is design, coding, maintenance, set up and operations for all our systems. At the same time, I am also involved and helping out as much as possible to all other components that our authentication platform includes, such as our mobile applications and SDKs, platform plugins and utility applications.
Lately in particular, I have been working on a couple of customer projects, as well as the design and implementation of a set of features on our backend that ensure the top security standards of our platform, as well as a series of improvements to our infrastructure that ensure its robustness and scale-readiness.
What do you like most about working at Futurae
The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that Futurae is a startup that strives to offer top-end user authentication products to its customers, while it remains very innovative and follows modern developments and technologies closely;
I have great interest and belief in our products, and have been enjoying the constant and challenging developments but also the learning process that this puts us through. Secondly, Futurae is a company built on team spirit, honesty and mutual respect; we have a culture that welcomes opinion, change, flexibility, diversity, not only in technical matters but also professionally and socially too.
These are aspects important for me to my professional but also personal life. Moreover, I consider myself lucky to be part of such a passionate and competent team of like-minded people, supporting and completing each other, working together and pushing the company forward! The list goes on, but I would say that this is a good summary of what I like the most here.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
We are a small company, and there are daily challenges and unknowns that we have to deal with all the time; not all of it is pleasant. For example sometimes we are dealing with so many things at the same time, and this can lead to mistakes as well as failure to communicate things clearly between us.
However - to come back to one of the things I like the most here - we always discuss things openly, learn from our mistakes, and change for the better. One more thing that has room for improvement, is the way that we manage our own products and tasks in combination with customer projects (which evolve around our products but are specific to the needs of our customers).
We are a product company, and since lately we have significantly grown our customer base, quite frequently we are also working on specific customer projects, and sometimes the way that we organize (with respect to time and effort) such projects in parallel with the work for our own products and tasks is not ideal. However, this is due to the dynamic nature of the tasks we are working on, as priorities change quite frequently sometimes; I am confident though that as the team grows we will be able to improve on this.