Welcome to a new Remitly ‘Week in the Life’ series, where we move across the globe to give you an exclusive peek into the lives of our Remitlians. Who are they? What do they do? What goes into reimagining international payments at scale?
Monday 🏠
8:00 — Brew some coffee and get my bearings for the week. This typically includes checking-in on my calendar/email/Slack for any important meetings or conversations I want to have in my mind as I think ahead. I’ll also pick up where I left off the previous week for the current project.
9:30 — Team standup. This is a nice opportunity to see everyone’s faces for a few minutes and catch up on where we are with our planned work tasks and also share some personal stories from the weekend.
9:45 — Focus time. Heads down in a code editor working on a feature for a project that will help us better protect our customers’ personal and financial privacy. This is my chosen area of focus and I do my best to improve this important subject area as much as I can.
11:30 — Lunch with my family, tidy the kitchen, and a quick bike ride to the hardware store to grab a few things.
12:30 — Reviewing some pull requests from the team.
1:00–1:1 meeting with our department director. We discussed details of a long-term project I’m in the process of designing.
1:30 — A quick break outside to soak in a rare sighting of the sun during the Seattle winter.
1:45 — More focus time, this time on a design for an upcoming project.
Tuesday 🏢
8:00 — Bike + train commute into the office. Having transit and commute options is really handy, and avoiding heavy rain by taking the train most of the way is convenient (not to mention the unlimited Orca transit pass provided by Remitly for Seattle-based workers).
8:45 — Settle into the office. Grab some Seattle Strong cold brew coffee from the tap.
9:00 — Various meetings all morning. This is a heavy meeting day, so it’s nice to have some of them in-person rather than over Zoom.
12:00 — Catered lunch in the office!
1:00 — Focus time in the code editor.
3:00–1:1 with my manager where we discuss any challenges I’m facing, as well as some general career development discussion.
3:45 — Spent some time booking travel for an upcoming team trip. We will be holding a summit with the other half of our team who are based out of our Cork, Ireland office!
4:15 — A conversation with our awesome Seattle Facilities Coordinator, Erin. We spent some time brainstorming ways to make our office more sustainable and environmentally friendly, something I’m also passionate about.
4:45 — Head home. It’s nice to see the sunset across Puget Sound on a clear day (sun two days in a row is very rare).
Wednesday 🏢
8:00 — Bike commute to the office.
9:00 — Team office hours, where folks on other teams have the chance to ask questions and get help from us.
9:30 — Sprint retro and planning. Time spent going over the last two weeks of work and planning our next two weeks of work.
11:00 — Getting a head start on the sprint work we’ve committed to.
12:00 — Lunch!
1:00 — Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DEI) all-hands meeting. I really appreciate these meetings, where we hear updates from various DEI groups at Remitly and have a guided learning and discussion session around rotating DEI topics. I have experienced a lot of personal growth from these meetings and have learned how to be a better ally to others. Remitly’s commitment to improving in this area is something I’m immensely grateful for.
3:00 — More heads-down development time
4:00 — A quick sync with a teammate about an in-depth technical challenge. These are fun! :)
4:45 — Bike commute home and pick-up some groceries on the way. I often ride an electric cargo bike, which makes easy work of the large and numerous hills in Seattle. It also makes transporting a large load of groceries a breeze.
Thursday 🏢 + 🏠
7:15 — Another bike commute!
8:30 — On-call handoff, weekly metrics review, and daily standup. This is time well spent in my opinion, where we dig into any on-call incidents or metrics anomalies in the areas we own at Remitly. While it’s nice to hand context over from one on-call engineer to another, having the whole team present allows us to help each other learn and grow around the devops portions of our jobs.
9:30 — A mix of heads-down time and short 1:1 syncs with coworkers around current projects.
12:00 — Another catered lunch and nice opportunity to catch-up with coworkers.
Afternoon — Heading home early to spend part of the afternoon with my kiddo while my spouse is in a class each week. I enjoy working at a company that affords me schedule flexibility and work/life balance.
Evening — Shifting some working time from the afternoon to catch-up on a mix of tasks, code review, google docs comment discussions, etc.
Friday 🏢
Friday = No meeting day.* I opted for the train + bike commute option today.
*We’ve instituted Fridays for no meetings on our team and many of the other Engineering departments. This allows us to protect valuable focus time. This time is spent either working on a technical design for a big project, working in a code editor and building things, learning something new, or whatever is the most important work at the time that requires long stretches of uninterrupted focus. And it’s really nice to end the week feeling like I’ve accomplished something significant.
The only interruption is…
…Cereal for Lunch! A coworker thought it’d be fun for everyone to bring their favorite childhood (or grown-up) cereal to share with each other, so they organized it into an event.
How did a week in Kyle’s shoes feel like? You could have a similarly brilliant career with us. Find our open opportunities on our Careers page.
