How would you explain Unit8 to your friend in 3 sentences?
The company was founded in 2017 by Marcin who previously worked at Swisscom as Head of Big Data and AI, and Michal who was Tech Lead at Palantir.
Marcin was frustrated to see that a lot of talented people were hired in the Silicon Valley to work for big digital companies, spending a lot of time on advertisement optimization rather than working on broader technological and real business problems. The result is that traditional industries, particularly in Europe, are increasingly left behind and miss the right talent for their digital transformation initiatives.
After many years in a “Swiss big corporate kind of ” enterprise, he decided to quit and created his company with Michal to help these traditional companies (like pharmaceutical, chemical companies, insurance and financial structures) to become more digital and help them to solve their business issues with AI.
Very soon, both were joined by some talented people (from Swisscom, Google, Amazon etc) to develop the start-up into a leading service-company. Unit8 was born. Today we are almost 50 people.
As advisors, we use a mix of Big data, artificial intelligence, data science, advanced analytics and software engineering techniques to solve the challenges that directly affect the business of our clients, be their operations, finance, manufacturing or R&D.
Unit8 SA - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at Unit8
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
Yes, you can choose your hardware within a reasonable budget.
Our set up varies according to position and projects. In general, you can expect:
- IDE: VSCode, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ/Pycharm
- Operating System: macOS and Linux
- Cloud based services such as Azure and AWS, and CI/CD tools
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
Unit8 is committed to developing an #awesomeworkplace where our engineers can flourish. We offer multiple learning and development opportunities such as:
- Engineering Groups
- ML Reading Groups
- Show&Tell sessions on practical business cases
- A Tailor-made mentoring programme
- 10% time dedicated to self-development activities
- Unit8 programme on leadership and soft skills development (under construction)
- Budget dedicated to learning activities or online courses
Experienced engineers can then take more strategic and leading responsibilities to support the company’s growth and develop their management skills for client-facing roles. They also mentor more junior engineers and accompany them in their career development.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
Most of the time, we prefer using existing frameworks (but after some careful due diligence on their usage, maturity and performance)
🔍 Check out the active job openings at Unit8 SA
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
- Customer focus: our team members are trusted advisors for our clients. They work hand-in-hand with them on long term projects. They develop tailor-made solutions to solve their specific business challenges. As a result, we are proud to continuously be mandated for new projects with ALL our current clients.
- Team over individual: we amplify our strengths and complement each other’s weaknesses. In our discussion the best ideas always win, above everybody's ego.
- Results matter. Have fun and get sh*t done! : self-explanatory.
- We never give up: perseverance is the common point in each of our projects.
- Positive impact on the world: we carefully select which projects we engage in and which we skip. We give part of our work as pro bono. For example, we worked with an international NGO to fight and prevent fires by developing a tool with AI. Also we contribute to open-source libraries (Check Darts! Our time series library on GitHub).
- Journey is the reward: we make each other better every day via constructive and respectful feedback.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
We are present in 3 locations: Lausanne, Zurich and Krakow (PL) with diversity of cultures and backgrounds in each. Each project team slightly varies in size but usually doesn’t exceed 5 people. Each team offer a mix of competencies in Data Science, Software and Data Engineering.
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
We offer a paternity leave of 20 days.
Thanks to fully flexible working time and some home-office, our team members can adapt their working schedule to their personal life.
What is your remote work policy?
We don’t have any strict policy in place. If you want to work from home, just make sure to pass by in the office a few days per week to exchange with your colleagues and have a coffee with them!
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
Our sprints are usually 2 weeks long, and we schedule between 1 and maximum 2 syncs per day, depending on the project. Meetings time is also dedicated to company projects such as hiring or working on our internal infrastructure and tools. One can expect 25% “meeting” time for 75% coding time.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
We participate in external workshops and hackathons, and we do have an educational budget.
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
Yes! These are the kind of activities you can do as part of your 10% self-development time.
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
- Buy the book.
- Fill in your expense sheet in our cloud-based expense platform (less than 5 min.).
- Your expense is approved by the end of the month.
- You get reimbursed onto your bank account a few days later.
💼 How does the interview process at Unit8 look like?
You will find here our detailed process with tips on how to prepare.
To summarize:
- Online coding challenge (for junior profiles)
- Online video interview with one of our engineer
- Online Technical/Coding Interview
- Onsite System design and decomp interview
- References check
Got any questions?
🕵️♂️ Extra - insider interview with Matthias Falk
Matthias Falk agreed to share a personal opinion about working at Unit8. He is the first Cloud / DevOps Engineer at Unit8.
What are you currently working on at Unit8
First of all, Unit8 is a services company focussing on data & AI. In that regard, I am helping one of our clients to design and build out their infrastructure for Machine learning and AI purposes. Together, we want to enable Data Scientists to do their best work possible by providing a Data Science platform. This is a very interesting and widely seen topic in the industry. Companies adopt Data Science and AI more and more in their organisations resulting in a growing demand for Machine Learning infrastructure.
As a Cloud Engineer a part of my job is helping our clients answer that growing need. I am translating user needs and infrastructure requirements into solutions and also consult on the best ways to get started with either on-premise or cloud infrastructure. Apart from my daily work for our clients, we like to learn at Unit8. Learning is a big part for me personally to grow, to learn new interesting things and also to stay up-to-date regarding the latest tech developments.
I think this way we are also able to provide the best services and input for our clients. At Unit8, I joined a learning group where we exchange on the latest engineering topics and develop software assets based on common needs we perceive in the industry. This is really cool and you get dedicated time to work on those things which I believe, in the engineering space, is so important. One of the topics I am interested in and currently work on is MLOps. Moreover, I am currently pursuing cloud certifications which help me learn and gain knowledge on different cloud providers widely adopted in the industry.
What do you like most about working at Unit8
Mindset and attitude to be honest. Of course we have incredibly skilled people (and by that I mean hard skills) who I can learn from. This is a big big benefit! But apart from hard skills, our team is so humble, so helpful and always supportive. When I joined Unit8, I received a culture sheet, where I must admit that these values truly matter in the company and are not only painted on a poster. Software development is a team sport, and you can really notice the difference between effective and ineffective software development teams.
My impression and experience also tell me that most projects fail because of the wrong mindset and attitude in teams and not because of the technical feasibility. With that team mindset and attitude, I believe we can have a great impact on our clients and spark a shift in their mindset.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
My motto is progress over perfection and I think a fast growing services company like us has several challenges where things are not perfect. The important thing is to voice them and work on them which we constantly do at Unit8 because of our honest and transparent culture. One thing I would like to change in the future is how we tackle long-term employee development. We can build on top of the learning mentality we already have, to also answer questions regarding long-term development.
I think the more you grow as a company, the more need you have for long-term development. I am asking myself who I can become and what I need to do to get there. By that I mean more personnel development related questions which really come on top of content-related learnings. And I would like to work on these questions together with my company.