Author: Lucien Döellinger | iOS Developer @insidesumupbr

Hi! My name is Lucien, I’m an iOS Developer at SumUp living in São Paulo, Brazil 🇧🇷. I’ll be completing 3 years at SumUp in July, breaking my personal record of time spent working for the same company.

I joined SumUp to be part of a team called Referrals . Our work is to provide tools to help our merchants refer SumUp products to their friends. Some companies don’t dedicate much effort for this type of acquisition, having only a simple mechanism of sharing a link and offering nothing more. At SumUp, we reward both the person that sent the referral and the friend and during the year we do challenges to engage merchants to earn even more money by using a word of mouth strategy. We have merchants that earn a living out of this program itself.

Now talking about mobile 📱, our main app is fully native (iOS and Android), having ~40% of the codebase in the newest languages Swift/Kotlin. We also have a separate app for banking in Brazil which is made with Flutter, so if you are feeling adventurous and like to use bleeding edge hybrid technologies, there’s a seat for you. We have about 30 mobile engineers worldwide, mostly in Germany 🇩🇪. There’s a CI system running code linting, unit and UI tests — if it doesn’t compile or tests are failing, you can’t merge. We also have a CD operation that deploys every few hours a new internal version with changes from commits in our develop branch. We do weekly app releases that contain features from all teams — given they’ve had proper quality assured.
We are concerned with the app crash-rate, keeping it at the 99% mark. Binary size is monitored to avoid increasing download size for our merchants and we follow GDPR rules respecting our users’ privacy — this means we think twice before adding a new SDK to the project.

We have a design system framework that is simple to use so you don’t waste time looking for all the characteristics of a label or button to implement. But, if you love doing UI 🎛, you may become a contributor to the design system yourself!
👥 You may work solo as the only mobile developer in your team if you know both platforms, you might also work alongside another developer from another platform (most common). Anyhow, you will get feedback from other devs in your Pull Requests and we have Slack channels so you can talk to everyone and ask anything.
The structure of teams (squads) is merely a formality, you are encouraged to contribute outside of it and not only on mobile. For instance, last year I learned a little bit of Golang by helping implement a small backend component, I had 0 experience in backend/Go before.

One of the benefits of working at SumUp is the hack day 👨‍💻 — it happens every other Friday and you can work on anything that you wanted to do at some point but didn’t have time. You can also take the day to study and learn more, we are offered a nice learning budget that even includes paid travels if you are willing to give talks in conferences. If you are like me and prefer to work in a calm space with a big monitor, then there’s the home office set up which is an option for everyone.

All in all, I like SumUp a lot — I’ve never interacted with such a diverse and global 🌐 team before. I had the opportunity to visit Germany in a global hackathon where we met our colleagues from abroad. Two people from my team even moved to Berlin, you might get this opportunity as well.

I hope you learned a little bit about what it’s like to work here.I look forward to building a great app with you and helping merchants grow worldwide.
Take a look at our Mobile positions and join us: https://grnh.se/a7c9a0fe2us

Original article published:
https://medium.com/inside-sumup/mobile-engineer-at-sumup-e59de091e05b