Tech

Niilo Säämänen

Mar 23, 2021

New remote setup at Wolt’s Product

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We often hear the question, “Why are you hiring so many engineers? Your app is ready already”.  

While I understand where it comes from, looking at the challenges we face in scaling our technology and products across the 23 countries (most recently we expanded to Japan and Germany) and the adventures in retail and “delivery of everything”, the question brings a gentle smile on my face.

For the past four years, we’ve been expanding from a few initial markets to conquer the world of last-mile delivery in 150+ cities across the globe and servicing our 10+ million customers . Along the way, we’ve grown from a handful of teams to over 20 teams of engineers tackling the challenges of blitz scaling our extremely customer experience focused consumer technology platform.

…Which brings us to the most important point: we need to figure out how we scale both our technologies and engineering itself to make cities easier places to live. We can’t do it with our current 200 people in Product at Wolt and we’re looking to double this year. 💙

We are searching for new talented professionals across engineering, product management, data and design to help us conquer our markets both old and new. 

First things first: How we work together 

We are obsessed with high ownership teams at Wolt; we believe in hiring excellent engineers and giving them the freedom and accountability to solve customer challenges and to build scalable products. This creates the most impact and efficiency, and the happiest of talented professionals. Autonomy means teams are in charge of their own roadmaps, how they build services and products, and how they solve challenges from new features to core scalability of their solutions. It’s a lot of responsibility, but we trust the people we hire. 

We work with a wide variety of technologies at Wolt, in fact, teams are in charge of their technological choices. We do provide a good baseline for scalability and robustness. The most common technologies are Python, Kotlin, Scala, Typescript, and Swift, though we have a bit of Rust hidden in the service. We run everything on AWS, with Kubernetes and a long list of infrastructure automation and various databases (Mongo, Postgres…) to boot. 

We are very big on building world-class products with great engineering. We actively refactor and rebuild core components to meet the demands of our wildly growing business. We love data and have a near real-time view of everything happening in our business and with our customers. 

Read more about how we work at Wolt and what we stand as a team. 

The new setup: Work from anywhere in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Denmark or Estonia

We used to prefer that you spend 3 days a week at the office to allow teams to share context and achieve serendipity in a high-paced scaling environment, and we were very relaxed on exceptions. Then came Covid, and we’ve been remoting ever since. 

It didn’t take us long to realize that the world would be moving towards a more flexible remote working model, and we’ve never shied away from challenges. We spent time figuring out how we do our very culture-oriented way of working in a remote setting and keeping the feeling of community and common goals aligned without losing who we are. And so we did. 

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve moved to support fully remote work in four countries in Product: Finland, Sweden, Germany, Estonia, and Denmark, and are actively hiring talented people from wherever we find them. We have tech hubs in Helsinki and Berlin for closer collaboration, and outside them support a flexible remote working model from home. After the world recovers from these dark times, we will have a mix of remote and office work, based on your preferences. 

For you we offer a wide variety of challenges to work on, career growth opportunities across competences, and deep technical tracks like Competence Leads or Lead Engineers. In fact, more than 50% of our engineers have changed teams to focus on new challenges in the past years, and as we grow, we are constantly building new teams and tackling new areas like live communications or personalised experiences. 

Our promise: Come to work with us friend – there will not be dull days 

It’s a journey that’s full of heart, wonderfully challenging problems and ambition to solve them in an elegant way. It’s about unlocking your new highs and making friends along the way. It’s about being part of a team that wants to increase wellbeing in the cities. It’s an exciting time to build last-mile delivery technology, and in many ways, we’re merely at the beginning of our journey!

Want to join our team to build Wolt together? We’re hiring! Check out our open roles at wolt.com/jobs 🚀


Niilo works as the VP of Engineering at Wolt’s Product+. Product+ is a collection of all competences and teams that make up the engineering, design, analytics and product management of Wolt. We are the people who build, maintain and advance all the applications, services, tools and infrastructure that is Wolt.

Author image: Niilo Säämänen

Niilo Säämänen

CTO at Wolt

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