How would you explain Swissquote to your friend in 3 sentences?
Swissquote is a bank that doesn’t feel like one, maybe because it was funded (and is still run) by two engineers who like to challenge everything that makes traditional banking irrelevant.
Out with the dress-code, the sluggish innovation and the inaccessible managers: we value personality, initiative and above all, team spirit.
Our teams of software engineers, legal officers, sales and banking specialists are empowered to work with a common goal: making trading opportunities accessible to everyone!
Swissquote - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at Swissquote
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
Due to the nature of our business, the setup is specific for home office work. But on site, the configuration is fully set up by yourself.
You can choose your own Operating System and IDE, but Linux and IDEA are most appreciated and recommended because we have many in-house contributions to quickly initialize a work station with those.
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
- Grow on the job by building innovative Fintech products with state-of-the-art technology, surrounded by 200 skilled peers from all around the world.
- Move from an exclusive coding job to an agile project management position and help our offshore teams to deliver the best quality
- With 130+ development roles in our company, we offer a great variety of tasks, and easy movement between teams: you can jump from a squad building our eBanking products to another squad creating new features for our complex forex platforms.
- We also offer opportunities of growing as a manager to coordinate and facilitate your team’s production and develop their skills.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
Thanks to the DTG community, we tried to balance what can be taken form the market with what should be home-made. For each framework, we are challenging the proposed solution to validate that it will fit with all business and technical requests.
🔍 Check out the active job openings at Swissquote
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
Our key values are:
- Dare to be different.
- Champion the customer.
- Unite as one.
- In pursuit of excellence.
- Always say it how it is.
- Do the right thing.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
We are really proud to have a very diverse staff, coming from all around the world (50+ nationalities) and with various backgrounds, which stretch way beyond banking.
Our technological profiles (developers, IT, product managers) are now united into Squads. Each of these cross-functional teams are dedicated to building, developing and maintaining one product amongst our 23 solutions (eTrading, eForex, eBanking, Cryptocurrencies).
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
We offer child benefit and 10 days of paternity leave; flexibility with unpaid leave and part-time employment.
What is your remote work policy?
Remote working options are available to all our software developers and most employees. People can work from home - one day per week or more, depending on their seniority.
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
We are mostly built around a standard agile process. Each squad is organized around 4 main events:
- Sprint Planning
- Sprint Retrospective
- Daily stand-up (around 15 minutes)
- Technical or business grooming
Sprint are generally set up for 2 weeks, and meetings represent around 10-20% of that time. Remaining time is used for development and training.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
At Swissquote, we work hard but we play hard as well. Our software engineers are invited to take challenges such as the Swissquote Battle (innovation contest for all company) or the Haqathon, an event for developers only which consists in find new solutions to improve the day-to-day operations at SQ.
We also sponsor one of the biggest Hackathons in Switzerland, Lauzhack, which takes place at the EPFL every year. Our developers build a challenge to test the skills of ~300 students from all over Europe.
Last but not least, we support the development of our employees by offering them the opportunity to participate in a conference or a training once a year. 40% of our developers are subscribed to Pluralsight, an online learning platform.
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
There are several possibilities to work on personal projects:
- The first one is to study and implement during the allocated personal training time, with the help of MOOCs and creating POCs;
- The other way is to first propose the idea to our DTG community (Design and Technology Group) and collaborate with them to deliver the project.
- Put your idea forward and implement it at the dev battle that occurs once per year.
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
First you need to check if the book is not already present in our Software Engineering Library. If not, just send a mail to send to the dedicated person and the book will be delivered!
💼 How does the interview process at Swissquote look like?
- Application through our website
- Phone conversation with our HR recruitment team
- Technical assessment (coding challenge, interview with developers)
- Final interview with managers & upper management
- Reference check & proposal
Got any questions?
🕵️♂️ Extra - insider interview with Maéva Ledreck
Maéva Ledreck agreed to share a personal opinion about working at Swissquote. She has been working at Swissquote since 2018 and is currently a Java Lead Development Engineer.
What are you currently working on at Swissquote
Hello! I am a specialist in the Forex post trading activities (Trading control, computation of bank swaps rates...).
In case you’re not familiar with the Trading glossary, “Forex” refers to the marketplace where various currencies and currency derivatives are traded.
My team of 4 developers (supported by 6 developers offshore) is in charge of the maintenance and the development of the Forex risk management application used at Swissquote.
As our main application is an alerting system, we need to monitor and manage the resolution of the issue reported in the application.
Within the years, I had the opportunity to grow at Swissquote.
From junior Java Development Engineer, I became the technical project manager of my team.
Basically, I am in charge of the daily planning of all the team members of the SQuad. In collaboration with the Product Owner, I am planning the delivery of the projects realized by our SQuad.
I am also responsible for the monitoring of the key performance indicators of the team.
Steps by steps I am slowly but truly doing less development in order to be focusing on what is exciting me the most: project management!
What do you like most about working at Swissquote
The atmosphere at Swissquote is excellent and makes the work environment pleasant and relaxed. We have a real in-house Pub in our Headquarters, frequent parties, sports activities, home office solutions, extra-professional competitions, technical conferences...
Otherwise, I would say it was the dynamism of the company that appealed to me. As Swissquote is expanding, creativity is still a big part of our culture.
It's like working in a company between a start-up (more flexible in its processes) and a large company (stricter in its processes).
The Software Engineering department is very dynamic, in perpetual search for technological and organizational innovation.
The setting up of SQuads to improve our productivity while giving extra freedom to the teams is a good example.
We have the chance to work on relatively technologies (Java 15, React JS, Docker, Kubernetes... ), which is not always the case in other companies.
In our Department there is very little impediment to the exploration and implementation of new technologies, I would say that it is even something very encouraged.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
Definitely the Covid-19 situation! We can’t meet other colleagues at our Pub anymore for after works and sport activities sponsored by Swissquote are limited.
I will also add that the fast expansion of the bank has some drawbacks.
As the company is at the door of new challenges, I sometimes feel a certain “artistic vagueness” in some of our work processes (a legacy of our start-up mindset) and I lived multiple organizational changes made to support our fast-pacing growth. This requires some adaptive skills if you want to fully bloom in the company.
Anyway, Swissquote is living a success story and I am happy to be part of it.