Working at Rivero
The Social Part
Rivero was founded only a short while ago by the three founders: Thomas Weber, Fatemeh Nikayin and Thomas Müller. Paul Koutinas and I (Dominic Egger) joined this week for prototyping and backend respectively. You can find us all here.
The idea of the company, in short, is to build a modular platform for the payment industry that allows financial institutions to work more directly with payment schemes (think Mastercard, etc.). Our different SaaS products will help banks to become more efficient, more compliant and to provide compelling services to their customers.
Currently, banks have to deal with rigid and slow processes involving way too many parties. Therefore, we certainly fall under the very broad umbrella term of Fintech.
The social outlook of Rivero deserves special mention, I think, as it is fairly uncommon for Switzerland. Sadly, salary transparency in Switzerland is generally very poor and it is also not something openly talked about to the detriment of employees.
Luckily, the founders decided to work with an open book policy from the start, which means that everyone can see everyone else’s salary as well as any other company-related data.
This means that there is actually equal pay for people and no shady salary negotiations. There is an open and transparent system that decides in what salary-category people get put. The current salary range is 75–100k CHF. Over time salaries will be adjusted across all categories. For instance, I make 90k CHF a year which is slightly below the Zürich market rate. However, that is a given in a startup and to compensate for it, I get Stock Options and a cool place to work at! Besides, there is also an extra week of paid leave for socially valuable work (e.g., teaching or animal/environmental welfare-work), an above minimum pension plan as well as actual paternity leave (which is not given by law in Switzerland, sadly).
We also would love to set up full remote work positions once we are more established and through the first start-up grind.
The Tech Part
To explain the technical side of how we work, I will go through how we are starting to do things on the backend as that is where I spend my time.
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Currently, we are doing the initial phase of hiring and we strongly believe that the tech stack should be decided by not only external factors like availability of developers and “what everybody else does” but also by what we collaboratively believe makes good software.
We also think that the backend correctness should be very important, so should be composability and sustainability. Since we want to encourage our engineers to keep on learning and getting better, we have very little qualms about employing powerful but more complicated tools here.
That is why I pushed hard for strictly pure functional programming for the backend. Right now, our very moderately sized codebase is in Scala using the Typelevel and ZIO.
At the time of writing this blog post, the codebase is only a couple hundred lines. After all, only started a few days ago, but here are dependencies for one of the modules.
“org.typelevel” %% “cats-core” % catsVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-core” % circeVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-generic” % circeVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-parser” % circeVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-refined” % circeVersion,
“dev.zio” %% “zio” % zioVersion,
“dev.zio” %% “zio-interop-cats” % zioCatsInteropVersion,
“org.http4s” %% “http4s-dsl” % http4sVersion,
“org.http4s” %% “http4s-blaze-client” % http4sVersion,
“org.http4s” %% “http4s-circe” % http4sVersion,
“eu.timepit” %% “refined” % refinedVersion,
“eu.timepit” %% “refined-cats” % refinedVersion,Personally, I would love to introduce Haskell at some point. We are developing a service based architecture and do not see why we should stay with one language if a task comes up that can be done much better in another. I would also love to explore formal specifications and proofs with technologies like TLA+, since we will be handling financial and private data. Lastly, I would love to use Dhall because I hope I never see another YAML file in my life.
I believe that all of these technologies and more in their vein align very well with our tents of correctness, composability and sustainability.
Getting in Touch
But enough about my little corner in the backend! Other than someone to help me out in the backend, we are also looking for a Frontend and a DevOps Engineer to join us.
Since both of those are not my speciality, I have much less to write about. However, I hope this post gives you a bit of an insight into how we operate, what we believe in and with what kind of technologies we want to work with.
If this interests you can head over to our website and check out the jobs section. If you have any more questions feel free to drop us an email (work [at] rivero [dot] tech) or ping me directly!
Please keep in mind that currently, we are looking for people from EU/EFTA countries to join us on-site in Zürich, Switzerland. However, we did set up an email (remotework [at] rivero [dot] tech) where you can send us your CV so that we have a list of people to contact as soon as we have remote work set up.
