How would you explain Nautilus to your friend in 3 sentences?
Innovation center of established connected fitness provider with startup culture and amazing peers. We work on different topics that will change the way people work out at home, with a focus on AI. Our current focus is on creating a digital personal coach.
Nautilus Switzerland - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at Nautilus
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
- HW: We provide all the up-to-date hardware necessary for your workplace by continuously making sure it meets all requirements from the employee side.
- IDE: Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code
- OS: Windows (including Docker and WSL) and Linux
- Cloud: Azure
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
We are very agile and try our best to give people the opportunity to develop into the direction they desire most. There are 4 job levels in engineering: I (Junior), II, III (Senior), IV (Individual Contributor). As an alternative, our team members can decide to move into a managing role while working in our teams. We put high value into learning by doing and support further education.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
We try not to reinvent the wheel, so if there is an existing framework that perfectly fits our needs, we use it.
🔍 Check out the active job openings at Nautilus Switzerland
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
Ownership is very much key in our team; we give full responsibility and expect our team members to live up to it.
Transparency is extremely important for us; we address things in an open and honest way and expect the same from people joining our team.
Optimism: we have a “nothing is impossible” mindset and set ourselves very high goals.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
We have self-organized teams of 3-6 people. They all work with the same processes, but on different products or parts of our products.
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
We are very open to find solutions for everybody on an individual basis.
What is your remote work policy?
While we prefer to have people on site on a regular basis, we see remote work and flexibility as important values.
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
A kind of lose Scrum, with self-organized teams and 2-weeks sprints. The official meetings in the larger teams are less than 5h per sprint. However, our teams have ownership of their products and usually spend a good amount of time planning the implementation of their features.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
We do tech talks on a regular basis and are open towards hackathons if driven from the team (not enforcing them on the team). We fully support education with both time and money.
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
Currently, not during working hours. However, we have quite a few team members who pursue open source and side projects in their spare time.
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
Just do it :)
💼 How does the interview process at Nautilus look like?
- Send in your application with a great motivational letter.
- Bunch of follow-up questions
- CV, Cover Letter, Follow Up Questions Review
- 30-min call with somebody from the leadership team
- Take home assignment
- 3h meeting: tech interview, personal fit, meet the team
Got any questions?
🕵️♂️ Extra - insider interview with Jan Stapelfeldt
Jan Stapelfeldt agreed to share a personal opinion about working at Nautilus. He works as a Software Engineer at Nautilus (previously VAY) since 2021.
What are you currently working on at Nautilus
I am working as a software engineer at Nautilus Switzerland (formerly known as VAY) and focus currently on building developer tools that we use internally in our HQ in Zurich but also company-wide within Nautilus. Those include tools that make the life of our movement scientists easier and more efficient. This could be some piece of software to automatically analyze and annotate workout videos etc. Also, we focus on making sure our machine learning teams gets the data that they need to train and improve ML models.
Another topic that is now more in maintenance mode is setting up our cloud infrastructure and monitoring. We recently changed cloud providers and improved a whole lot of things in the process. Doing cloud migration really taught me a lot of skills and gave me so many insights into all the systems we use at NLS CH.
So in summary, it’s development tools, enabling other teams and leaning a little towards the DevOps side.
What do you like most about working at Nautilus
Great about being a software engineer at Nautilus is that we can solve tough challenges that allow us to build cool things, and at the same time it’s a constant learning of new technologies and improving as a software engineer at the same time. We have so many smart people working here which have so much commitment for what we are building together. That really is a key driver and shapes the working culture. Also, the people are amazing and really fun to work with but also, they’re great buddies to have a Friday beer or shoot some Darts.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
I’d say we have some challenges that every small and young company is facing. We are in this transformation phase from being a small company with a few employees to becoming a little bigger. We are now soon cracking 20 employees in Switzerland, which does not sound like much, but the change from 10 to 20 to 50 has a big impact on the culture and organization of a team.
On the other hand, we are suddenly part of a big company with over 500 employees. These things certainly have some impact and trigger transformations in our company, but we are up for the challenge and are spending quite a bit of time making sure things go in the right direction.