On The Hunt: Citymapper
I’m an alien-unicorn from planet Glitter — can you explain to me what your company does?
Humans are social animals and like living bunched up in places called cities. In fact cities keep growing as more and more humans want to live there. This creates problems as all humans are trying to get from one place to another in the city using things like cars, buses and trains.
Citymapper is making cities usable by providing humans with all the options to get anywhere using our app on their smartphone — comparing walking, cycling, public & private transport options.
In addition we have a product called Citymapper Pass (London only for now) that allows users to pay for all their transportation needs in one easy weekly subscription.
Describe your company culture?
Citymapper as a team is extremely product oriented. Every single employee has a say in shaping the product. We don’t just develop it — we use it everyday ourselves, which gives us insights into how to improve the product. We are solving our own problems and those of our friends and family.
Having been around for a while we have a set of best engineering practices and process in place — but we still operate as a startup giving everyone ownership over their work.
What are your main focuses at the moment?
We’ve launched Citymapper Pass earlier this year (London only for now). It is a weekly subscription that covers both public and private transport. This is made possible by us issuing a beautiful green MasterCard cards to our users that they can then use for buses & trains (Transport for London) as well as for bikes and cabs.
Citymapper Pass is the evolution of us being a transport app, allowing users to book and pay for public and private transport.
Private transport options (cabs, bikes, scooters, mopeds and unicorns? that you can book through an app) are becoming increasingly common in all cities — and we are the app that allows users to discover and compare all of these options.
How did you hear about Unicorn Hunt and what do you like about it?
We asked new joiners and candidates where they looked for jobs. The biggest source that candidates mentioned is that they were going through all the daily use-case apps on their phone and looked for jobs at those companies. We are fortunate that we are a daily use case app for millions of users — and that many of those users live in London where our offices are located. (However we do consider remote candidates for some positions) The benefit with candidates that have been users for a while is that they know us already and have a good understanding of the problems we are solving.
However unicornhunt.io also popped up several times. What we like about candidates from unicorn hunt is that these applicants made a conscious decision to look for jobs within startups. We are still a startup with a small engineering team.
This is great for engineers as it gives everyone a broader remit and ability to influence the technology and product. However it also requires a specific mindset to be able tackle business problems, keeping both product and technology in mind when designing and developing new systems.
What advice would you give other startups that are hiring?
We believe that for startups mission and culture fit still matters.
People who work in a startup should care about what they work on — if they just want to earn money they’d be better off working for scale-ups / corporates. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay your employees below market rate (in fact if you want good people you’ll still have to pay decent salaries) — but money shouldn’t be the main factor that convinces applicants to join — it should be a combination of mission fit and working within a strong but small engineering team.
What advice would you give people applying to work at Citymapper?
We are a startup and we all care about urban mobility and how our product solves some of the challenges around it. Before you apply please have a look at the space we are in and the challenges we are trying to solve. You’d probably find that there are many interesting challenges that all need solving in order to make life for all city dwellers better.
If your company was a board game what would it be and why?
If you’d asked about what computer game we would be the answer would be simple — Simcity. This is at the core of what we do — building and fixing transportation networks and expose them to our users. In fact — we have built our very own tool called Simcity a while ago when we were still running buses:
But as you asked about a board game (looking around the office and go through our stack of board games used for the occasional Friday evening game..) it is probably going to be “Ticket to Ride” — in the end it is all about the trains!
Citymapper is hiring! See all available roles on Unicorn Hunt
Read more about what Citymapper’s up to on their blog: engineering.citymapper.com/
