History and some stats
Since starting three years ago, CurrencyFair has scaled massively as a business. Going from $50k transferred on day one to an amazing $500m transferred to date, and with a goal of $1b in the next twelve months, the company is definitely on the right track. To achieve that goal, we need to be transferring nearly $3m / day - thats about $34 / second! As with any goal, the company needs a great group of people to achieve it and so we will also need to grow aggressively across all teams.
These objectives and growth plans are dependent on a number of teams including marketing, customer service, payments and tech. Each team is going to face unique challenges as they try to achieve their goals and support the others. Without any one of these teams, things begin to fall apart. At a very high level:
- Marketing aims to gain and retain customers
- Customer service is the direct interface to our customers
- Payments handles our customers’ money
- Tech allows our customers to interact with the other teams
Our posts here are going to focus on the tech team and the challenges we face as we grow and support the other teams. Every now and then we may dip into topics outside of tech, but only with the aim of putting the particular challenge into context.
What will we talk about?
Tech isn’t just about the website. As I mentioned above, every team interacts with each other in different ways for support. In the early days of a startup at least, all teams will interact with each other. So, we will look at the different interactions that we have, the challenges we face and the solutions we use to overcome them. On a high level, we hope to look at topics like:
- #processes
- #tools
- #languages
- #frameworks
- #infrastructure
- #security
Our aim is to share what we have learned and what we will learn, in a bid to learn more ourselves and to also show others what it’s like to work at CurrencyFair. We also hope to opensource any tools that we develop that we think would be of benefit to the community.
Who are we?
We’re a group of engineers who have worked in large corporations like IBM, and startups like scrazzl.com and hostelworld.com. You can hit us up on twitter here: Paul or Daniel. If you like the sound of CurrencyFair, why not think about it.