Meet Our Development Teams: Value for Life
Team Value for Life is on a mission to enable smart business decisions based on data. They are different from other development teams at Smartly.io because their direct customers are not our app users but other Smartlies. “We collect, warehouse, and refine data to support business intelligence, invoicing, sales operations, and product management,” Sampo, the team lead for VfL, explains. “We’re building a foundation for scaling the company by improving and expanding the underlying data architecture.”
Data warehousing and a new invoicing service
At present, the team has two bigger projects in its hands: data warehouse development and a Ruby on Rails project that aims to encapsulate all invoicing-related architecture into one service nicknamed Pennybags. “It’s not just refactoring,” Sampo says. “A big part of the project is to develop a new invoicing logic that empowers the future of our business, where we offer multiple product and service combinations on a variety of advertising platforms.”
Data warehouse development is another intriguing undertaking by team VfL. “Essentially, we’re moving a terabyte’s worth of data into a new database,” Sampo explains. “The old PostgreSQL database isn’t the ideal solution for analyzing big data, and we hope to fix that with the new Snowflake data warehouse.” Being able to analyze the large volumes of data our app generates is a key prerequisite for being able to produce market insights and productize optimization strategies for our users.
“One of our biggest challenges is to restructure the entire data pipeline,” Sampo says. “Before we turn to technical implementation, we need to be able to visualize what data is collected, how it is collected from a variety of endpoints, and how it is managed so that it is optimal for data analysis.” To accomplish their goal, VfL works closely with multiple teams around the company to build an understanding of how the data warehouse and pipeline should be built so that they serve the company in the best possible way.
A team with a diverse skill set
VfL is a unique team also because it houses professionals with a diverse set of expertise areas: Sampo, Evgeny, and Mika make up the developer subteam, each of them with six to 15 years of experience in software development, a backend focus and fluency in databases. They work closely together with their product manager Tiia, business intelligence analysts German, Tuomas, Tomi, and Pekka, as well as business system specialist Katri. “We prepare the data in a way that it can easily be processed and refined by others,” Sampo explains. “For example, the BI team builds dashboards on top of our data warehouse, which in turn helps other Smartlies around the organization make decisions in a data-driven way.”
The team is looking for a new member to help with bringing Pennybags, the new invoicing service, towards its vision of encapsulating invoicing related logic and enabling new types of offerings. “Now that we have an opportunity to re-do the service, we want to double down on details and create a precise and sustainable system that’ll serve us well as the company scales,” Sampo says.
Learn more about how developers work at Smartly.io at smartly.io/careers/developers.
Originally published at https://www.smartly.io.
