How would you explain Migros to your friend in 3 sentences?
At Migros Online, you’ll be part of giving millions of people in Switzerland an easy and sustainable digital shopping experience. We value open communication, flat hierarchies, and challenging the status quo. Our working culture gives as much priority to having fun as it does to building great products.
Migros Online - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at Migros
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
You cannot pick any hardware yet, but you can choose between powerful macs & PC. Coding is done mainly through InteliJ. We use Atlassian for dev & infra related activities. CI/CD is mainly driven by Jenkins and Github Actions. Deployments end up up either in OpenShift, GCP and Azure.
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
We integrate learning in our everyday work - everyone is welcome to take on different tasks that they’re interested in. Our goal is to provide developers with clear options to evolve within the company, be it as a technical contributor or in a leadership role.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
We will avoid re-inventing the wheel as much as possible, unless there is a very good reason to do so.
🔍 Check out the active job openings at Migros Online
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
Our values are Belonging, Can-do spirit, Agility, and Ownership
For example: We organize regular social events to bring teams closer together. That can also include things such as team lunches or Thirsty Thursdays. We live the can-do spirit by encouraging experimentation and discoveries over lengthy discussions. This also goes hand-in-hand with the agile mindset that we are growing in each team. Lastly, by staying focused and having transparency on who is doing what we reward a strong sense of ownership.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
Each team is cross-functional and usually includes a tech lead, product owner, UX hero, and data analyst among the other devs. We are looking for developers that can work full-stack so they can contribute to the T-shaped team mindset.
We aim to keep team sizes within the “2 pizza teams” limit. If you want to know more about this term, here's an article that describes it;
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/introduction-devops-aws/two-pizza-teams.html
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
We offer a flexible work environment where employees can choose to work at 80% or even less for some positions and set their own schedule as long as the team and business stay aligned. Our work from home policy enables people to work from home about 4 days a week with a team meeting day which is chosen based on the team’s preference.
We offer 18-week maternity leave paid at 100% and 4-week paternity leave paid at 100% and also give the opportunity for future mothers or fathers to take unpaid leave after maternity and paternity leaves. Other types of unpaid leaves are usually possible but have to be discussed with the manager and HR beforehand.
All our employees get an extra day off on their birthday as we care about work-life balance and want them to be able to spend that special day with their loved ones.
What is your remote work policy?
It’s very flexible. Some teams will have a weekly “ team office” day but those are not mandatory. Most IT people work 3-4 days remotely.
We also give the possibility to work from abroad within Migros Online in EU countries for up to 30 days a year which can be taken in a row or separately through the year with the exception of interns and cross-borders which can’t benefit from it due to learning and regulation reason.
Working outside EU countries is still under investigation as it’s a more sensitive matter and for the time being has to be discussed for each case but as general rule is allowed up to 1 week a year.
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
We believe Agile is a mindset and not a process. All teams will loosely follow the scrum rituals and it is up to each team on how they best iterate and improve their processes. With that being said we focus on keeping things lean which means reducing unnecessary meeting time.
In most cases we have a CI/CD development process. There are some exceptions but the general trend is to be able to release frequently and easily.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
Each developer gets a yearly training budget that they can use however they want. In addition, we also have excellence afternoons each week, during which a dev can spend time on things not directly related to project delivery.
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
See answer above. If the excellence afternoon is not enough you can always take it up with the tech lead to find a sensible solution.
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
You can simply buy the book and have the expense reimbursement approved by the team lead.
💼 How does the interview process at Migros look like?
1st interview: Typically there first is a “get to know you” interview with a tech lead and HR. The candidate gets a feedback in 1 week up to 2 weeks if we go further with a tech interview.
2nd interview: This would be followed by a hands-on technical interview where we might cover some real-life scenarios and we try to avoid textbook questions. The candidate gets a feedback in 1 week if we go further with the office visit and a team meeting.
3rd: In most cases, we will also try to introduce you, the candidate to the team you will be working with either via an in-person lunch or a remote call. The candidate gets an offer a few days later.
Got any questions?