Employee Highlight: Luigi, Backend Engineer

Q&A with Luigi, Backend Engineer at Tray.io

How has Tray.io supported your career growth?

I joined tray around 3 years ago, back when I was looking for a job in a start-up, working on an exciting product and a place where I could grow as a developer.

Then, you only needed two hands to count the number of people working in the London office. I brag about this with my friends, because you don’t always get to see a company grow so much in such a short time.

After interviewing with the team, better understanding the product, the culture, and how I could develop as an engineer, I realised that Tray was where I wanted to be.

In fact, I started working as a connector developer and a year later, I moved into my current backend role.

What are some things you’ve learned since starting at Tray.io?

I have learnt that we’re all making an impact.

Whether you work in development, design or customer support, we all contribute to the success of our product in our own way.

Our platform allows users to create workflows and automate manual processes of any complexity, but it is only useful if it’s fast and easy to use. I want to be proud of the work that I do and know that the customers are happy with the services we provide.

I have learnt that food is life. Even at work I embrace the pizza mindset: create a base that is simple and yet so exquisite and highly customisable. The size of the projects that you’re working on will no longer make any difference to you. Just remember that even when you develop the smallest ingredient, you’re giving a customer an opportunity to customise the pizza to fit their needs — hopefully not pineapple…! :)

What kinds of technical challenges do you and your team face?

Think how many actions you can perform on external services just by adding a step in a workflow. Then think how many steps you can add to your workflows….

Then think bigger!

Think how many workflows you could group together and split your business logic into.

Then think bigger — one more time!

Think how much value it would add if you could package and execute all of these workflows for each one of your users, allowing them to configure some parts of it in a dedicated screen. It’s mind-blowing, just like my team… the embedded squad!

We are responsible for the development and maintenance of internal and external facing tools that allow our customers to create integrations for their own customers.

It can be challenging at times. Tray offers our customers infinite ways to build and develop solutions and each customer has a unique and diverse set of requirements. Designing our system in a way that is flexible enough for all customers whilst balancing the need for stability and scalability are technical challenges we face on a regular basis.