Scaling N26 Technology Through Hypergrowth

What is the work you are doing today?

I'm a tech lead at N26. I've been working for the company for the last three years. N26 is a mobile challenger bank and we are divided into segments. The segment that I'm working on currently is the engagement segment. This means that we try to deal with features around engaging users with a useful app. These represent the home screen, which is like one of the heaviest screens of the application which everybody sees as soon as they log in.

What are the goals you have for the talk?

I've been working for the company for the last three years. For a start-up that looks like an eternity. At the very beginning, it was quite dynamic. Zero coordination in the sense like not formally expressed, but mostly informal. And you rely a lot on individual skills. And then we went through hyper-growth. this means that our engineering group grows like three or four times the initial size. So we went from having in something like 40 to 50 people to having 300.

Can you tell me a bit about the technology stack at N26, what does that look like at a high level?

We use microservices architecture which means that potentially each microservice can have its own stack. But we tried to be consistent across our ecosystem. Which means that we started early on with Java because it's one of the most popular languages. But as we grow and discover new languages, we adopted Kotlin because of its simplicity and all that it brings to the table as a modern language. Currently, on our backend services, we only use Java and Kotlin and for most of our services we only use Kotlin. We use the spring boot for web frameworks and then for storage we rely mostly on SQL; for some others, we will use document-based storage. We use Rest for communication in between services, but we rely a lot on asynchronous communication using the AWS messaging systems.

Do you think those technology choices have an impact on the culture and your ability to scale the teams and keep your teams performing well?

Yeah, definitely. I think it's really important to pick the right technology stack for a couple of reasons. One of the things that you want to have with your stack is that it actually enables you to deliver faster because the end goal is that your users get more feature sets.

What do you want people to leave the talk with?

What is important about this talk is that people might be at different points of their journey as a company. The idea is that I am going to share what we did in the last three years, and in those three years we were small, we were medium, and we were like big, like right now. Each of those stages will have some learnings. Learnings may apply to the audience, and some others might not apply to the audience. There will be some main takeaways depending on where you are in your journey that you can apply to your day to day work.