TechLead-Story: Michael Kröll, CTO at geizhals.at

Team

Size and Roles:

• The Tech Dev team currently consists of 14 individuals in the second district of Vienna.
• Specializations include DevOps, Back End, and Front End, working collaboratively on the development of price comparison web portals, APIs, and internal tools.

Organization and Methodology:

• High-level goals are defined or adjusted in three-month cycles.
• These goals are translated into epics, broken down in weekly iterations, blending aspects of Scrum and Kanban.
• The hybrid approach balances development speed and quality effectively.

Distinctive Team Aspects:

• The team emphasizes producing high-quality code rapidly, rejecting the acceptance of technical debt.
• Openness to second opinions and continuous improvement is valued.

Recruiting

Integration in Recruiting Process:

• With a manageable team size, the Tech Dev team is involved in designing its recruiting process.
• Typically, two rounds of interviews per position involve an HR specialist in one and a team member in the other.

Onboarding Procedure:

• Each new team member is assigned a mentor for the initial days or weeks.
• General onboarding includes an overview of processes, best practices, and tools, followed by collaborative problem-solving on programming tasks.

Qualities Beyond Technical Skills:

• Attributes such as a willingness to learn, ability to work independently, implement solutions, and a commitment to continuous improvement are highly valued.
• Cultural fit within the existing team profile and character is also considered during hiring.

Technologies

Technical Challenges:

• The E-Commerce market's rapid growth poses challenges in adapting systems to increasing data volumes.
• Dealing with large datasets, for example, managing an average of around 200 million retailer offerings that change daily, is an ongoing challenge.

Technologies in Use:

• The company adheres to an Open Source Stack, including Ansible-provisioned Debian Linux, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch, Varnish, Nginx, Perl, React, and Less.

Evolution of Technology:

• Founded around the turn of the millennium, the company has witnessed the evolution of technologies.
• Virtualization, modularization, and automation now play a significantly more critical role in their technology stack.