Joining savedroid’s Pack

Earlier this year savedroid disrupted the crypto realm with the world’s first crypto savings app. Designed in Germany, savedroid aims to make cryptocurrencies accessible to everyone. In the future, you’ll probably see more products with this kind of functionality and we are immensely proud to say that we are the first.

It was put quite well by Yassin Hankir, savedroid’s CEO:

“With savedroid we aim to address four issues with the crypto industry: usability, security, trust and adoption of blockchain technology. Our goal is to drive the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies with an environment that is user-friendly and simple to understand.“

As you can imagine, combining this innovative concept isn’t easy, so who actually builds this?

Who we are

Most of the people who work at savedroid agree that the best thing about coming to work in the morning is the team.

As of November 2019, we’re around 30 people and we’re scaling fast. We hail from 16 different countries, each with different expertise’s and interests so it’s hard to put in words exactly what values unite us as a team, but here’s an attempt:

Ownership — People at savedroid care about what they do. Everyone feels responsible for their areas and the short and long term success of savedroid. In practice, this means being aware of the larger impact of decisions and being considerate about the impact of your work in others. Sometimes a business will push hard for something that will be good in the short run, but cause problems down the road. We don’t live by ‘just do it’ but we approach tasks in the context of “what effect will this have on our goals?”. This is invaluable. Without ownership, everything would fall apart.

Democracy — we don’t have a top-down approach. We have a flat hierarchy and new hires will be expected to contribute to the debate and the decision making process as much as the veterans. That’s one piece of feedback we get from new hires: they felt like their opinion mattered and that encouraged them to take ownership.

Quality — We’re building products. Not only products but crypto products. Mistakes can be very expensive both financially and also in terms of trust. One big mess up and it could all be over. In our apps, code quality is a first-class citizen and we dedicate story points to it in our sprints. Ok, we have to rush to meet deadlines sometimes, but we will always go back and clean up after ourselves.

Some of our team members.

How we work

At savedroid, we’re using a variation on the squad and chapters approach. We work in task forces and cross-functional teams. savedroid isn’t thought of so much in terms of Product handing off to Development, but a team taking ownership of a particular product or feature group.

Currently, we have the following teams:

1. Marketing — all topics user acquisition, landing pages, generating leads, championing the brand, campaigns and messaging;
2. Product — key stakeholder in regards to manage, conveying the vision and delivering the development of web and mobile applications covering onboarding, conversion, and the digital interface;
3. Customer Service — a sub-team of Marketing that not only supports and fulfills the customer requests but also bridges product development with marketing and our users.
4. Operations — from HR, to Legal, to Ops. They are the the oxygen that sustains the entire business. This team cover administrative, personnel, resource planning, and legal topics.

At savedroid we use scrum. We have an established development team, and a product owner that maintains a prioritized backlog and test features on staging.

Typically, after the sprint planning meeting there’s a second devs-only follow up where the team discusses the more complex tickets and ensure that we’re all on the same page.

Some of the tools we use:

• Jira for project management;
• Bitbucket for hosting and repository;
• AppsFlyer for mobile analytics and attribution;
• Mixpanel for customer insights;
• AWS for hosting;
• Microsoft teams for real-time communication.

Who we’re looking for

The kind of people that we hire ticks three boxes:

1. Smart

We’re not building WordPress sites here… Combining crypto and fiat is a difficult task with very high stakes. We’re looking for clever T-shaped individuals who can either have strategic thinking and strong communication skills or write good code and learn quickly. What we’re doing isn’t particularly easy, so if you struggle to pick up new technologies and concepts, this probably isn’t for you.

2. Adaptable

We’re a small team for what we’ve built and it has proven useful time and time again to be able to move resources around. We expect our colleagues to work on a number of different projects and areas. This doesn’t mean you’re going to be changing contexts several times a day, but rather that we like people to become familiar with more and more over time to encourage collaboration and avoid knowledge pools.

3. Cultural fit

Our team is a composition of smart and beautiful people who enjoy each other’s company and collaborating together to build awesome products. What we have is very special and it could easily be ruined by hiring the wrong person. The right person is someone who’s a team player, someone we want to teach and learn from.

What happens next

The interview process has 3 stages.

1. Introductory screening call

A short call with HR, where we get to know the basics about you:

• Professional experience;
• What you’re looking for in your next job;
• Familiarity with our apps;
• Salary expectations / availability to start.

We also give you the savedroid pitch and the opportunity to ask questions. This can be followed up by an HR-personality test.

2. Meeting the team lead

At this point, the hiring manager wants to understand if you have what it takes to get the job done. Be ready to talk about your experience, achievements and qualifications. We would like to get an accurate and authentic picture of you and also present the challenge ahead.

Also, we will describe our work mode and discuss the employment conditions. If we agree together that an employment would be possible, we invite you to a trial day with us.

Please use this as an opportunity to talk about why you’re interested in working with us.

3. Trial day

If you make it this far, we’re pretty serious about you and we want to see you in action! We will ask you to spend an exciting eye-opening trial day with us to confirm we are a great match!

The purpose of the trial day is to get you to know our office, look over our shoulder at work and to get a picture of what is being done and how we work. At our lunch break, you can talk with your future colleagues, and doing so complete your picture about us.

You’ll have some interviews where you will learn about the work and have the opportunity to present your abilities and strengths. Each interview is individual — we want to get to know you as you really are. We will ask you about your professional goals and would like to know your thoughts on the industry and how you would like to develop your career further.

You’ll present a task by the end of the day and after that, we determine together how to finally proceed with the job or internship.

Bonus tips

You will have multiple interviews during your trial day. This might sound stressful, but it’s a great way to see what it’s like to actually work with you.

Technical knowledge / Career

Example things we can ask:

• What’s the toughest technical challenge you’ve solved so far?
• What’s on your learning list?
• Tell us about a side project.
• What’s your biggest achievement so far?
• What’s async / await and how would you use it?
• How do you measure success?
• If you had to build a simple Reddit clone, which tables / collections would you use for the database and how would the relationship between them be?

Cultural fit interview

The team is savedroid’s most precious resource and we want to make sure that we’re a good fit for you and you’re a good fit for us. You’ll have a chat with some savedroid veterans or some of the co-founders.

We ask ourselves these three questions:

• Would I like to have a beer with this person?
• Am I excited to teach / learn from this person?
• Does this person believe in what we’re doing?

We typically move quite quickly and try to make an offer within 1 week after the trial day.

Ready to join the team?

Get in touch via the careers page. See you soon!