How would you explain SCIGILITY to your friend in 3 sentences?
We build custom data software products with a holistic offering that covers architecture, platform engineering, data engineering and implementation of ML applications.
As a team of ~25 highly motivated engineers, we are working separated in different projects across Switzerland, Austria and Germany, but we always stay in close touch to exchange and support each other.
SCIGILITY - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at SCIGILITY
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
You get an annual IT budget that you can spend for any hardware you need for the job: laptop, mobile phone, home office equipment, etc.
The exact coding setup will depend on the project(s) you work on, but we always strive to keep this as modern as possible.
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
You can have up to 20% of your time available for non-project work, which can be used for personal education, internal knowledge sharing, developing the company, etc.
Our career framework clearly states which seniority levels we have, which responsibilities are expected from you at which level, and each level is linked to a transparent salary range.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
If possible, we don't reinvent the wheel and always promote to use existing frameworks, if they are a fit for the project.
Note that you will always be heavily included into architecture and design decisions and can actively influence these things yourself!
🔍 Check out the active job openings at SCIGILITY
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
We are a team, not a collection of lone warriors: Even if you are not part of a larger project team in all cases, everyone in the company is just one Slack message away from supporting you if you need a rubber duck.
We are experts in what we do, not yet another staffing agency: You are generally not assigned 100% of your time to projects, but always have room on the side for education, internal knowledge sharing, company development, and other things that make yourself or us as a company better.
No one is perfect, no one knows everything: Retrospectives after finished projects help us to get better in the future, your team lead and the management are there for regular personal check-ins, and the rest of the engineering team is motivated to support you technically whenever needed.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
We usually have between 1 and 3 people from Scigility at a customer, but this heavily depends on the type of project. We staff projects with the mix of people which is needed for a successful project outcome: different engineers (software, data, platform, DevOps), data scientists, architects, or product owners.
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
We offer 4 weeks of paternity leave and 14 weeks of maternity leave, both of them fully paid.
Our project work can be organised in a flexible manner, which also nicely allows for part time child care on the side; contact us if you want to talk to some of our various young parents we already have in the company!
What is your remote work policy?
Our projects require you to be on-site one day per week on average, but this heavily depends on the project: There may be cases where a bit more on-site work is required, but also projects that can be executed fully remote. Because of legal requirements of our customers, you have to live in Switzerland in every case though.
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
This heavily depends on the customer organisation of each project. Whenever we are in charge, we structure this as lean as possible, but sometimes we have to adhere to the existing structures.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
We meet once a month for a full day all-hands company meeting with workshops, talks and management updates. Additionally to that, you are allowed to spend up to 20% of your time for educational activities, and we will cover for courses and material needed whenever it makes sense.
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
We encourage you to use the time besides project work for any activities that bring you forward as an engineer in our company, or that provide some benefit to our company directly. If you have ideas about own projects or open-source work that makes sense, let's discuss it together!
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
Just buy the book, put it as expense into our HR tool and you will be automatically reimbursed end of the month.
💼 How does the interview process at SCIGILITY look like?
Our interview process consists of three steps, all of which are done remotely (but can be done on-site on request):
- 45min video call with someone from management or a lead engineer: Introduction on both sides, higher level technical and behavioural questions plus room for all the questions that you have. The goal is that both sides can get a first impression to see if they want to continue the interview process.
- 1.5h video call with two people from our engineering: 5 days prior to this 2nd interview, you will get a technical challenge which you can solve at home on your own time. The challenge will test your knowledge and capabilities for the role you applied for, consisting of problem statements around software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, data science, architecture and general consulting capabilities. The results you hand in will be the basis for the 2nd interview, where we'll go through your results together and challenge you on specific points we deem important.
- 1h video call with HR: If both prior interviews were successful, you are invited to a final round where all the contractual details will be negotiated and discussed,
Got any questions?
🕵️♂️ Extra - insider interview with Mikolaj Kesy
Mikolaj Kesy agreed to share a personal opinion about working at SCIGILITY. He is working there as a Big Data Software Engineer since 2018.
What are you currently working on at SCIGILITY
I'm currently working on a customer project focused on building a data platform for sensor reads. The main objective of the platform is to gather, clean, enrich the sensor data and then further expose them to final consumers to support their decision process. The project requires a relatively deep understanding of the business domain that the data represents.
To achieve that I often talk to engineers from other fields (non-IT) to better understand the problem which is interesting and gives this feeling of purpose.
Technology-wise we are based on the CDP Hadoop stack with Spark on Scala being our main tool for developing data pipelines. However, the project will be soon migrated to the Azure Cloud which I personally also find an exciting challenge. The work is organized in SCRUM, however, the SCRUM Master is flexible and tries to get the most out of the framework for the team and not only blindly follow the rules it imposes.
Apart from this main project I just described, I'm also supporting other Scigility colleagues working on different assignments when it's needed. It keeps my exposure to a different set of technologies and problems which is quite stimulating for further growth.
What do you like most about working at SCIGILITY
I would say the main thing I enjoy is the overall "profile" of the company. It consists of a few things. First of all, Scigility is focused on data projects. Thanks to that, as Data Engineer I have the feeling that there is all the time some interesting things going on, in an area that suits my development path.
The size of the company is also a plus for me. Being not too big gives the feeling that everyone is just "a Slack message away" as was mentioned in one of the job offers. One can basically have an impact on how the company is shaped.
Last but not least, our team is great. We are all motivated people who are keen to learn new things and share our knowledge. This is also supported by the company's management as at the end of the day we need to be up to date to stay competitive. We can dedicate up to 20% of our time to learning and training. Additionally, once a month we all meet for our Scigility Day where colleagues share cool things they do on their projects or just something they recently learned and found of value.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
Optimally, there would be more teamwork and integration among employees. Due to the company's nature, we are scattered across different cities and projects which makes it sometimes a bit difficult to get this team spirit feeling compared to more "stationary" setups. However, we still have an office in Zurich where everyone is welcomed, and do our best to stay in touch and build relationships with the team.
Scigility Day and other integration events definitely help there. On the other hand, there is more freedom where and how one wants to work. After all, everyone needs to find an environment that suits him best as we cannot have it all.