This is CheMondis.
At CheMondis, every single employee (of currently 56) is constantly working towards our common goal to shape the digital future of one of the largest B2B markets in the world. CheMondis is building the marketplace for the Chemical Industry, combining deep industry know-how with the latest digital technology. We connect verified professional buyers and suppliers in one trusted marketplace to facilitate the digital trade of chemicals, deliver efficiency and data-driven insights.
To make this possible, CheMondis is structured in five teams:
Our People and Organization Team
- Our Commercial Team
- Our Engineering Team
- Our Product Team
- Our BI Team
Each of these teams follows the logic of agility. Meaning that tasks are shaped and prioritized regularly. This applies to each team individually but also to interdisciplinary work. For many projects, we build project teams with colleagues from various disciplines.
Job Profile Insights.
With this new series of blog articles, we’d like to give you insights into different job profiles at CheMondis, as well as into our organization. We kicked off the series with the article about Umut, one of our Business Development Managers followed by Torben’s article about the profile of a Product Owner. Today we’ll continue with the series with one of our Engineers.
How do you get the best insights, you ask? Well, by asking one of our Engineers directly, of course.
Who is Sufyan?
- Age: 30
- Previous job experience: 2 years working as a Java backend Engineer before resuming his studies to get a Masters’s degree in Computer Science back in 2016
- Responsibilities: Implementation of applications on our marketplace
- Joined CheMondis in October 2018
- Why did you join CheMondis? I find the concept of digitizing an “old-school” industry very exciting. But also, the great team culture and opportunity to learn and involve in building something great from the very start.
Is the engineering team organized in any specific structure?
The team is organized into different development teams, consisting of 4-6 teammates. Each team has the skill set to work independently and autonomously. Within each team, there is a Product Owner, a Product Designer, Frontend Developers, and Backend Developers. By structuring into different development teams, we ensure to design our development processes in a fast and efficient way.
Let’s take a quick look into the responsibilities of the two typical roles of our Engineering team:
Frontend Developer: The Frontend Developer takes care that any internet browser can display the CheMondis marketplace and enables the user to interact with our website.
Backend Developer: The Backend Developer is responsible for any kind of logic that is happening in the background of CheMondis to enable the user to benefit from the CheMondis services.
What do you think is important to bring along in terms of experience to fulfill the job of an Engineer?
Of course, the basis of fulfilling the job is becoming familiar with the tech stack. There is no way around it. Within the team, we work closely together and are always facing new challenges, in which one or the other is already experienced. Therefore, you need to be able to learn, adapt and grow day by day. Perhaps one thing in the area of development may concern only pure coding. But that is not correct. You need business acumen to develop e.g. a new feature properly. Since we develop in two-week sprints, time management is of course also an important skill.
What are the typical tasks of an Engineer at CheMondis?
- Collaborating with the product team to refine development requirements and estimate the work ahead.
- Communication and alignment among the development teams and with the in-house stakeholders.
- Coding new exciting features and testing them before pushing live.
- Presenting the features in in-house review meetings to make everyone aware
- Always hunting down the bugs crawling in the codebase
- Code reviews of other developers
What would you say are the top 5 skills you need to become a successful Engineer?
- Compatible and efficient knowledge of the targeted tech stack
- Ability to learn
- Team player
- Interpersonal skills
- Always up for a challenge
How does your typical working day look like?
10:00 Starting the day with a coffee
10:15 Checking the mails
10:30 Daily SCRUM meetings
11:00 Code reviews and coding
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Having a look at the Monitoring dashboards to see if everything is going fine
14:30 Another intense session of coding a feature or fixing a bug
15:30 Attending meetings if any for that day (every second Wednesday is full of meetings as we finish the previous sprint and plans/kick-off the next one)
16:00 Having a chat with the colleagues (about some issue or feature or just on some random stuff, be it related to tech or CheMondis or movies and music or games perhaps) while grabbing a snack from the kitchen
16:30 A final run of coding and before closing the day
What do you value the most about being part of #teamchemondis?
Our great team spirit is what I value the most. Everyone is motivated and pulling in the same direction to drive CheMondis to the best chemical marketplace and that makes the difference. Besides that, everyone helps everyone for the best possible result. I appreciate this learning environment very much. In addition, efforts are seen and recognized so that one’s own work is appreciated.
What are your biggest challenges?
I would say there are three major challenges we tackle in the Engineering team.
1. Never ending technological advances
We need to always make sure that every framework and library we are using is up to date. With every update, we need to make sure it’s compatible with all other integrations. In a time where developments never stand still, this is a special challenge.
2. Develop with deliverables
Whenever we work on a feature that cannot be done in a single sprint we divide the task into multiple parts, so-called iterations. This gives us the opportunity to learn from the previous iterations for further improvements. For each iteration, we must make sure that the iteration has something valuable for the stakeholders and that’s a deliverable. We provide a basic feature first with just the most necessary parts and then, in the upcoming iterations, we keep on adding until it’s finished. So that’s always a challenge to divide the feature into multiple iterations that each iteration has something to deliver to the stakeholders.
3. Bringing together the best implementation designs with user-friendliness
Since the design team is always concerned about how a feature could be the most pleasant to a user’s eyes, engineers always must debate the future implementation of the feature in multiple aspects like performance, architecture, capacity, and maintainability on more realistic grounds – a middle ground must be found here.
Thank you, dear Sufyan, for taking us through your day and sharing important insights into your daily routines, tasks, and challenges.
Now It is Up to You.
You would like to become part of #teamchemondis as well?
Check our open positions and Irene Prinz is happy to meet you in a first interview.
