Kili’s Engineering Team: Our Core Values

Here is how Kili's engineering culture helps employees develop a cutting-edge product and become better individuals.

Three years have passed since the first line of code was written at Kili Technology. It was time to reflect on the few key patterns that have guided us ever since.

Maybe you are a newcomer, a potential recruit, or just a curious developer. Anyway, I hope it will help you have a better grasp of our day-to-day work at Kili Technology.

🙆‍♀️ Agile for the client

The engineering team at Kili is responsible for delivering an ambitious client-centric roadmap. We build a product that will shape tomorrow’s artificial intelligence (AI), and the way data scientists interact with data.

The market is brand new, and competition flourishes. So we favor a fluid organization that always needs to adapt. We follow one-week SCRUM sprints with daily meetings and weekly ceremonies. The engineering team has 3 squads that mirror our business: Image (for visual data), Documentary (for natural language data), and Core (for the foundations of the application).

We iterate with clients every week. The engineering team teams up with the product and the customer success teams, to make better decisions.

The engineering team is present at every step:

• New features are designed hand-by-hand with the product and the client. We are quantitative-driven and want decisions to be taken based on facts so that the engineering team focuses on the right problems at the right moment.
• Technical strategies are refined by all members of the tech team during weekly technical plannings. That way, all developers are pushed to generate ideas and to progress.
• When developing, we favor pragmatic working solutions over complex over-engineered strategies. We only refactor and generalize once a pattern is found more than twice.

📈 Work and grow with the best

Our business stands at the intersection of software and data. We need the best software engineers and the best data scientists. We cover complex topics from web development to machine learning. We go where nobody has been before because the AI market is still young.

Technology is our DNA. We are not afraid to deep dive into cutting-edge scientific papers or new frameworks to explore the latest trends. However, we prefer well-established state-of-the-art proven technologies over hype. That is why we use TypeScript everywhere, React in the frontend, Node.js in the backend, Kubernetes for the infrastructure, and Python & Cython for machine learning.

We make individuals grow because they make teams grow. Helping and challenging one another is mandatory. We call it andon. If a developer experiences a challenge, he/she has to seek help in less than 15 minutes. This contributes to an open culture where nobody is afraid to ask for help.

• Junior engineers are always guided. In addition to andon, we provide weekly training sessions on both software and data topics.
• Senior engineers are called to be leaders. They have their say in people management and technical decisions.

Everyone has a dedicated coach with weekly one-on-one meetings to follow up on personal objectives and become a better individual.

Should the CTO code? Yes. Should squad leaders code? Yes. Leaders inspire through action. Leaders are relevant when they confront actual technical challenges. Everyone in the engineering team contributes to delivery.

🥷 Move fast, fight debt

We need to move fast, so we are doers and makers — people that are biassed towards action.

Going fast doesn’t mean piling up technical debt. We see technical debt as a phenomenon that is worth fighting. Velocity can also mean quality. That is why we put in place:

• Weekly brainstorming sessions to dig up new technical debt.
• Kaizen, continuous improvement sessions where developers reflect on solving business-critical problems — like deploying code to production even faster or reducing the number of bugs in the application down to zero.

We spend time perfecting the tools that make us faster. Automated CI/CD pipelines, systematic testing, and standards allow us to go faster to production with a higher level of quality.

🍺 Work hard, play hard

We find tech everywhere. From sourcing new talents to finding new leads, tech is everywhere in the company. So, we work hard to sustain that one value that will make the company succeed.

But we also enjoy time together as a team:

• Every two months, the whole team enjoys a two-day offsite retreat. In particular, we already went skiing, boating, and hiking!
• Twice a year, we take part in a technical challenge (Google Hash Code, data challenges). It is the occasion to write code in a completely different context… with pizza and friends.
• A running group meets every Thursday morning and competes for Kili at local running events.
• Every Thursday, we share drinks on our rooftop!

Our team is diverse from all backgrounds and locations in France. We are remote by default, but we also have headquarters at the heart of Paris.

Do you recognize yourself in these values? We are a well-funded technology startup and we recruit on a variety of jobs: Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Data Scientist, etc. Come work with us by contacting angel@kili-technology.com!