We need help to 2x our capacity, tech team and one more thing in Oda

Tl;dr: In Oda (previously known as Kolonial.no), we’re used to moving fast as we build a new infrastructure for grocery shopping. With the surge in demand due to Corona, we now need to move twice as fast — and particularly in scaling our warehouse and logistics platform and the tech team who builds it. How? Invite talented people (especially experienced software engineers!) to join us, give them a clear mission, and let them do magic. This is the time to join if you want to make a lasting impact on our technology and society.

2x speed (with the same quality)⚡️

In Oda, we move fast. For example, we built a completely new fulfillment system for our warehouse logistics from the ground up in just a few months — including all software, AI, and robot and automation systems. Normally building this would take years, and the typical result would be a black box you can’t change or improve fast. Instead, we aimed for complete end-to-end control over our systems, resulting in world-class efficiency levels in record time.

We already had ambitious plans to ramp up our technology. Now, in light of the Corona outbreak, we don’t just need to move fast, we need to do everything much faster than anticipated. And meeting a 5–10x increase in customer demand in our supply chain, warehouse and distribution operation is not solved simply by spinning up new cloud instances to handle the load. It is a super complex challenge involving lots of people, software, hardware, analytics, AI and UX.

To increase our capacity, we have already created a brand new product and operation in 48 hours and recruited 200 new employees for our warehouse in just two weeks. However, we need to do way more than this to provide even more customers with groceries in the months to come.

That’s why we’re writing this post; to share our challenge and ask for your help. 🤞

Our delivery vans are busy serving more customers than ever in an otherwise very quiet Oslo, Norway.

Double our logistics capacity and Product & Tech team — again! 🚀

It’s more important than ever to rapidly scale our logistics platform. And not just the software, hardware, AI and great user experience, but the people behind it all. Not just to power our existing logistics operation at our warehouse in Lørenskog, but to add new warehouses and locations in the future. One warehouse is simply not enough to meet the demand for having groceries seamlessly delivered to customer’s doorstep — and especially considering that we only cover the eastern part of Norway right now.

Building our unique logistics platform from scratch in a single team and getting it to work at our Lørenskog warehouse in record time is one thing. Getting it to work across multiple warehouse sites while remaining great at continuously developing it across a wide range of problem spaces and tech teams in parallel, is something truly different. It’s a huge challenge, but we believe it’s doable. We just need more people with the right mindset, grit and experience onboard to make it happen.

Specifically, we need help to solve these challenges in the next 6–12 months:

• 2x our logistics capacity: One warehouse won’t be enough long term, and we have to start to prepare for this future. One thing is the physical building with robots and other hardware. But we also need our custom-built software to work across multiple warehouse sites, and with slightly different hardware setups. We need our capacity planning and business-critical production systems (including our AI solutions) to factor in multiple sites. And to add on — we need to revisit how we do route planning for our cars and distribution from multiple locations.
• 2x our tech team: Our Logistic Platform product area needs to grow from 3 to 7–8 teams; from 20+ to 45+ people; with a majority being software engineers. And that’s in addition to doubling our Shop Platform, Data & Insight and Infrastructure & IT areas. Of course, the most important thing is getting the right people.
• 2x one more thing: We have a very transparent company culture, and actively share our strategy and how things are going. However, there is one thing we wish to 2x that we can only share with those on the inside. It’s an exciting one.

So to all the software engineers out there reading this, we need your help to:

• Shift to a distributed architecture: Our majestic monoliths have given us great speed and flexibility from the start in 2013. As our systems increase in complexity, traffic/load and number of contributors, we need to shift towards a distributed architecture to reduce cognitive load, ensure separation of concerns, and enable small teams to iterate quickly in parallel. This requires nailing things like robust system communication, a software delivery platform to ensure smooth deployment, instrumentation and logging for developers, and reusable design systems.
• Build and refactor without downtime: In the high-growth phase we’re in, the systems that power our warehouse and distribution are all business-critical, and any issues quickly affect lots of employees and customers. This means we have to code, deploy and change things reliably without disturbing production, requiring things like comprehensive test suites, warehouse simulations, redundant components and observability.
• Transform tailored systems into an adaptable platform: We need to move from a suite of tailored systems built for one specific warehouse and customer product, towards a platform to power multiple warehouses with slightly different layouts and a customer product serving different needs. This will require us to build configurable and adaptable software without introducing unneeded complexity and overhead — a challenge for experienced software engineers.

Among other things, we need to clone our robots “Mostly harmless” (left) and “Don’t Panic” (right) to multiple warehouses in the future 😅

How we work

How can we achieve all this? We think the answer is great people and a great culture. If we get the right people in and keep building on our culture, we’re confident we can trust those people to make it all happen. Let’s share a few thoughts about how we think and act:

• We’re a mission and value-driven company. Our mission is to build the world’s most efficient retail system, and we value customer focus, efficiency, reliability, working in teams of teams, and thinking long-term about everything we do.
• We fundamentally believe cross-functional teams close to the problems are best suited to solve them. Day to day you’ll strive to solve complex sub-parts of our mission in a team with software engineers, designers, data scientists, product analysts, product managers and stakeholders.
• When we’re not working remote due to Corona (which works well, thanks Github, Quip, Figma and Hangouts), we enjoy working in dedicated team rooms accompanied by pleasant social zones. In addition, our culture of high trust and transparency makes it easy for everybody to be “in the know”.
• We’re fond of seeing both problems and solutions IRL; either by meeting customers or spending time in our warehouse. We have an internal saying that “you’re not a full-stack developer unless you need protective shoes to test your code” — a standard part of your equipment pack.
• We expect you and your team to not just build software, but to take time to understand the underlying problems well (hence spending time in our warehouse operation with protective shoes), ideate options, test and validate them, before you build, scale and improve them.
• When we build solutions, we try to stay pragmatic. We spend our innovation tokens wisely, but continuously evolve our tech stack to be ready for the future (right now we’re using Python, Django, React, Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake, dbt, Kubernetes, Salt, Terraform, Datadog and Sentry).
• We deploy often, do code reviews, contribute to and support open source projects, and organise hackathons to balance our 6-week shaping/build cycles with “unplanned” experiments.
• Oh, and operating all of these business-critical systems, that’s also your team’s DevSecOps responsibility.
• What else. Yes, lunch. When we don’t share pictures of our lunch in #homeoffice-lunch on Slack thanks to Corona, our chef spoils us with amazing lunch every day in our office in Nydalen.

Good lunch is good for business 😋

Key roles and teams right now

While we offer great job opportunities in all of our Product & Tech teams, we are currently in particular looking for experienced software engineers, and have some very exciting upportunities up for grabs. You’ll find all our open positions in software, data and platform and reliability engineering (and more) at careers.oda.com.

If you want to solve complex problems, build something that really matters to society, and shape the future of our technology, team and company in a defining moment, now is the time. Reach out; we’re ready to talk.

Thanks for reading. We hope to hear from you!

Best regards,
Christian (co-founder and CTO), Espen (CPO), and the rest of the Product & Tech team in Oda.