Working at Form3 - Build the Next Generation Payment Technology

Form3 was founded in 2016 by four banking and technology leaders with a single purpose - to transform outdated, complex, and costly payments infrastructure into a modern, cloud-native, real-time Payments-as-a-Service. Today, they design, build, and run the technology that powers the future of payments.

We recently chatted with the talent acquisition team at Form3 and asked them to give us an insight into the company and the way they work. Enjoy!

Let’s start with why should someone work at Form3?

Form3 operates at an exciting intersection of operating at scale, working to disrupt an important industry, in a secure way, and using the best technologies for each technical challenge. Form3 has a diverse range of teams focusing on novel problems in each of these directions. We have strong links to industry experts in financial technology, and leading technologists working with and developing Go, Kubernetes, and Terraform, among other tools.

This offers a vibrant environment where people can pursue a number of interesting related skill sets and can specialise in a number of disciplines and product teams when appropriate. Above all, people are constantly learning and developing themselves in order to disrupt Form3's competitors and to produce breakthroughs, and Form3 has delivered a number of very significant milestones.

### How would you describe the dev team at Form3?

The development team is composed of motivated, self-directed, and experienced developers. Some of the team are new to Go, some are new to Fintech, but all engineers share real ownership of technical decisions, and can develop ideas into full-fledged solutions. Some of these solutions stand alone, some of them integrate with massive existing solutions, and at all points in between. Opinions and evidence are well received when developing new solutions and when adapting existing solutions as situations evolve. In terms of processes, each team operates in the way that is most appropriate to the primary projects that the team supports.

In turn, each of these projects is normally made up of several interacting microservices. Typically, tickets are defined by product managers working with the development team and the customer-facing aspects of the business. These are then elaborated on and developed by engineers working in pairs, and pairs can change often. Each ticket belongs to the development team until it is in production, meaning that there is a strong emphasis on quality and DevOps. Seeing change progress to production provides powerful feedback loops and is very fulfilling. In order to enhance this further, we use heavy automation, Infrastructure-as-Code, and sophisticated logging and monitoring solutions to help us to keep the feedback loops constantly turning.

Tell us a bit about Form3’s tech stack.

We are using a very well-thought-out stack, a mix of open source and licensed products. Our main development language is Go, but we do have some services written in Java. We use AWS to deploy our services, but there is an initiative to make our stack cloud-agnostic, and the first target for that is GCP. We use Terraform for IaC, Travis for CI, and a myriad of monitoring tools to make sure that our platform is running as it should.

I think that the stack we are using is very cool in itself, but the coolest thing is the way we use it and the problems we solve with it. We use a pattern called CQRS and our platform is almost completely event-based.

Join us and I'll tell you more!

### What are some tech challenges Form3 is trying to solve?

How do you process hundreds of millions of transactions within the limits and timeframes of a real-time payment system, while at the same time providing consistency, reliability, and security?

That is our main, everyday challenge. However, we can definitely split this into several smaller units. For example, having multiple cloud providers in which we can seamlessly deploy our platform and provide services is a project we are working on right now, and an exciting one!

What’s your favourite part about working for Form3?

That's a tricky question. It is difficult to pick just one part. But I can honestly say that the people are absolutely brilliant. Smart, dedicated, thorough, helpful, always willing to help. Combined with the remote-first approach and the technology we use, and honestly a fantastic C-level team, it is a great, great place to work.

In 2020 you doubled the size of your team, all while being remote. How do you make sure everyone stays connected and feels part of the team and more importantly shares Form3’s values?

Our engineering team has been fully remote since 2017 so working interviewing, onboarding, and working remotely is second nature/part of our DNA. We have perfected our remote recruitment and onboarding process, so it all starts here. As early as on the screening calls, we talk about things like remote work and pair programming to ensure that those who join Form3 are fully prepared to join a fully remote team.

In addition, we keep a fully remote engineering team together through things like daily pair programming. Our engineers pair on average 50-80% each day and they also change pairs on a weekly basis. This means that our engineers are socialised with everyone in the team, it creates a really good vibe in the team and that sort of stuff. We also do daily stand-up, have quarterly paid meetups and a virtual quiz on Mondays.

What are some traits that would make someone successful at Form3?

We’re looking for people who are:

• Honest
• Genuine
• Friendly
• Open
• Love to solving complex problems
• Love to collaborate and share ideas
• Have a learning mindset
• Hardworking
• Driven

This sounds awesome! If you’re interested in working for a vibrant, innovative company and would like to help shape the future of payments, you should check out Form3’s open roles here!