Employee breakdown
Data
10%
Design
10%
Engineering
55%
Product
25%
Soil Capital
Agri-food / Animal Nutrition, Environment / Sustainable Development, SaaS / Cloud Services
Ottignies-Louvain-La-Neuve, London, Paris
Tech team
Our vision in the Tech team is to find the perfect balance between delivering top-notch quality Apps and meeting the needs and timing of the Business roadmaps.
We are a group of around fifteen people with skills revolving around the Web development i.e. NodeJS developer, PHP developer, Product Manager, Product Designer, BI engineer...
To complement our Company values, we are guided by four strong internal values inside the Tech team:
- Deliver state-of-the-art App. This one is about that balance explained in introduction to this post
- Ownership, Commitment and Trust state of mind. We build such a benevolent climate of trust that we naturally take ownership on topics, we dare to innovate, potentially fail and be vulnerable.
- We have strong processes build to help us become more and more efficient... not just to have processes! *The team is our main asset and we are proud to have a diverse, curious and motivated team that likes to work and have fun together.
The Tech is divided in 2 parts...
- The Product part made out of the CPO, Product Designer, Product Managers and BI engineers.
- The Dev part made out of the CTO and engineers.
Key numbers
10
Product deployments every month
Technologies and tools
Python
100%PostgreSQL
100%PHP
100%Node.js
100%React
100%Azure
100%
Backend
Frontend
Devops
Atlassian suite
The whole management of the sprints, deployments and documentation is hosted in JIRA and Confluence.
ProductBoard
The main Product tool used to sort and centralize all the inputs and feedback coming from various internal and external stakeholders in order to build the roadmaps and supply ranked backlogs to the Dev Squads.
Phrase
The whole translation process is centralized in Phrase to ensure we have qualitative and consistent translations throughout all our Apps.
Organization and methodologies
The Tech is divided into 2 main parts, the Product part and the Dev part. People are grouped into autonomous, homogeneous and versatile Squads focused on one App. The Squads are supported by transversal roles like the CPO and the CTO.
Each Squad follows a classic Scrum methodology that revolves around a Ceremonial made out of Backlog grooming, Backlog refinement, Sprint planning, Standup, Sprint review and Sprint retrospective.
Part of the time of the team is reserved for "non-productive" moments called "cool-downs" to give room to the Squads to innovate, release steam and reflect.
The spirit behind the management style is to give a frame and direction to the teams and give them the appropriate means while trusting them to work on the best initiatives to solve user problems and create value.
Projects and tech challenges
Among our Apps, there is the Farmer Portal used by the farmers to input all the geographical, technical data and practices they do during a farming season on their farm and fields in order to have a comprehensive GHG carbon footprint.
This App revolves around an interactive map (Mapbox) on which the farmer can easily create his or her farm and its evolution season after season by merging, modifying and splitting fields. This need some heavy Backend calculation eased by the use of the PostGIS PostgreSQL extension.
There is also an extensive Backend (PHP) science to keep track of all the history of changes done on the farm year after year and to take them into account to compute the right GHG footprint for a specific farming season.
Eventually there is a real UI/UX challenge (React) to get non tech-savvy people, the farmers, to input correctly their data in an efficient way and to provide them with accurate and easy to understand GHG reports made out of graphs, benchmarks and contextual advice.
Recruitment process
The hiring process is made out of 4 steps :
- Step 1: a phone interview of around 30 minutes with the People specialist to further introduce the job, discuss why the candidate is willing to join SoilCapital and what he or she is looking for in a job. This is mainly a Soft skills interview
- Step 2: Some tests to do at home are sent to the candidate.
- Step 3: An interview with the Squad tech lead and with the CTO, on premises if possible, to test further the technical skills of the candidate and, more importantly, his or her ability to integrate the squad and become productive within 1 month. This step is also the opportunity for the candidate to informally meet the members of the Squad he or she will potentially shortly join.
- Step 4: Optional coffee talks with other members of Soil Capital.
