Tech perspectives behind Nubank’s first acquisition deal
This article has been migrated to our new blog. Find it at https://building.nubank.com.br/tech-perspectives-behind-nubanks-first-acquisition-deal/
What this business move means and how it strengthens our scaling capacity
2019 was an outstanding year for Nubank. 2020 kicks in bearing the exciting challenge of scalability and sustainable growth to new geographies, new segments, and new products while nurturing our unique customer excellence.
Achieving those goals is deeply connected to the way we are organized as a company and the diverse people and capabilities we have inside our teams — which is why we are so excited to share some news that will help us in these challenges.
Today, Nubank announced that it signed an acqui-hire deal with Plataformatec, one of the most prominent tech consulting companies in Brazil, with over a decade of solid deliveries to a wide set of clients across different countries. So it is with great excitement that we welcome these talented software engineers and agilists on board to join our squads.
It’s also worth noting that Plataformatec is globally known as the company that created the Elixir programming language, which started as a Research & Development project led by the company’s engineers for building scalable and maintainable software.
We greatly value Elixir and its community. In 2019 we hosted Elixir Brazil in our headquarters in São Paulo and we are confident that the language, its contributors, and projects will keep growing and developing independently from Nubank. A group of extremely qualified people will continue to develop Elixir.
Talent acquisition: why we value it so much
By bringing Plataformatec’s professionals together with our skilled tech teams we become stronger as the leading independent digital bank in the world. As of today, Nubank has nearly 20 MM customers, roughly growing by 50 thousand customers per day. It goes without saying that these numbers reflect the way we build our services, our architecture and how fast our internal processes run. But there is always room for improvement and the quest here is how to do this at an even more complex scale.
Some of Plataformatec’s agilists have already worked with Nubank over the past few months in different squads and projects. This proven track record has provided some of our teams with restructured rituals and new working agreements. We also saw improvements in our work with better-planned teams using throughput metrics and more reliable estimates. This increased the teams’ engagement and ownership, proving to be very promising first steps towards better multi-functional collaboration.
We are looking forward to expanding this type of improvement to other squads and tribes inside of Nubank’s product teams as well.
The acqui-hire process also gives us the opportunity to strengthen our Software Engineering chapter with skilled professionals that have years of experience in functional programming. This is extremely valuable, especially during a hypergrowth moment and after a year marked by intensive targeted hiring initiatives (such as the Yes, She Codes events) that allowed us to bring 300 new engineers in a year.
Here at Nubank, we have very high expectations for 2020, so we are thrilled to start the year with such good news and to welcome such talented professionals to our teams.
