How we work
Engineering teams
At Form3, we are firm believers that our teams should have autonomy and ownership of their work, and of the entire platform too. Our teams are responsible for every aspect of the work they are delivering, including testing, deployment and infrastructure. This gives our engineers a wide variety of challenges and growth opportunities.
Team Structure
We are firm believers that our teams should have autonomy and ownership of their work, and of the entire platform too. Our teams are responsible for every aspect of the work they are delivering, including testing, deployment and infrastructure. This gives our engineers a wide variety of challenges and growth opportunities.
Our team structure is organised with end-to-end ownership in mind, and each team consists of a mix of engineers and payments experts.
Markets
Our markets teams build and run critical payment processing services in the UK, Europe and internationally. We support a wide variety of payment processing schemes such as FPS, BACS, SEPA, SWIFT and more.
Key technologies: Go, Java
Here are some of the exciting things they do:
01
Implement and maintain the payment gateways which link our core platform with all the external payment schemes
02
Wrangle a wide variety of different integration technologies into our secure, resilient, cloud-native platform
03
Build microservices in Go (with the occasional older Java microservice thrown in), running on ECS or Kubernetes
04
Scale processing to millions of payments a day, while exceeding strict performance and reliability benchmarks
05
Work closely with the product and business teams in each market to build complete customer propositions
Core
Our core teams build, run and maintain critical cross-functional capabilities and services on our platform.
Key technologies: Go, Java, Elasticsearch
Here are some of the exciting things they do:
01
Develop and maintain shared functionality on our secure, multi-tenant systems through a mix of Go development and some older java microservices
02
Continuously improve our low-latency, high-throughput distributed payment processing architecture
03
Scale our high-volume transaction processing and storage, to process millions of payments a day across all our different markets
04
Design our core architecture to work across multiple cloud providers, while scaling, and remain secure and resilient
05
Design and build a highly flexible payment workflow engine to allow different types of transaction flows for each individual payment
Platform
Our platform teams build, run and maintain the infrastructure behind our cloud native systems. The teams play a crucial role ensuring the reliability and scalability of our entire platform.
Key technologies: Terraform, Kubernetes, CockroachDB, NATS, Cilium, AWS, GCP, Kong, Vault
Here are some of the exciting things they do:
01
Deliver and maintain our highly resilient, highly available, secure cloud infrastructure, networking and platform components
02
Use infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to automate the build and maintenance of standardised stacks across multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, private cloud)
03
Work with Kubernetes and cloud-native data and messaging services such as Cockroach DB, NATS and Cilium to build our next generation platform
04
Design, build and maintain a highly resilient cross-cloud architecture to allow us to run active-active across multiple cloud providers
05
Build and maintain our private cloud stack running Kubernetes in our own data centres, adapting all our cloud-native technologies to this environment
06
Design, build and maintain a platform where any component (from networks, routers, servers, to OS and microservices) can be removed, replaced or upgraded without causing downtime
Tooling
Internal tools drive the productivity of our entire engineering team, and help us deliver software securely and at speed. Our tooling teams build and maintain our extensive developer tooling ecosystem.
Key technologies: Terraform, Kubernetes, Go, Github, AWS, Grafana, ELK
Here are some of the exciting things they do:
01
Build, deploy and maintain all Form3’s internal tooling using Go, Terraform and various open-source tools
02
Work together with other teams to identify, gather requirements and deliver tools that continually improve our development and delivery processes
03
Continually improve and scale our CI/CD tooling, logs, metrics, alerting and tracing platform, and remote access technologies
04
Work closely with InfoSec to secure all aspects of our internal tooling
05
Have a passion for software development best practice, and understand how tooling can support that
InfoSec
Form3 have an extensive team of defensive and offensive engineering teams that work together with our security officers.
Our security teams work closely together with all our other engineering teams to ensure that we maintain the highest standards of security on our platform.
Written by
Adelina is a polyglot engineer and developer relations professional, with a decade of technical experience at multiple startups in London. She started her career as a Java backend engineer, converted later to Go, and then transitioned to a full-time developer relations role. She has published multiple online courses about Go on the LinkedIn Learning platform, helping thousands of developers up-skill with Go. She has a passion for public speaking, having presented on cloud architectures at major European conferences. Adelina holds an MSc. Mathematical Modelling and Computing degree.
Catch up on our latest blog posts
Blogs · 5 min
Phishing with GitHub
For a Red Team operator it can be disappointing to retire a particular technique, but it can also be an opportunity to share their knowledge with the community. Phishing operations can require a lot of time and effort to set up the infrastructure, acquiring and categorising domains, fine tuning payloads, preparing pretexts and bypassing those pesky filters and controls, but there are ways to make the process simpler. This post will explore one such method, using GitHub as a tool to distribute, host, and compromise a target in a bait, hook, and catch operation that can be done from a mobile device. This post will cover: GitHub Apps, Hosting, Distribution and SSH Access.
February 1, 2023
Blogs · 5 min
My first month as a Senior Engineer at Form3
It's always daunting moving jobs. In this post, Chris Townsend shares insights into his first month as a Senior Software Engineer at Form3. He talks us through his reasons for joining, the interview process and his onboarding experience, as well as what his future career aspirations are.
January 25, 2023
Blogs · 4 min
.tech Podcast - Alternatives to async code reviews
Dragan Stepanović is a Senior Principal Engineer at Talabat. He joins Renato Rodrigues de Araujo, Senior Software Engineer at Form3, to discuss asynchronous pull request based code reviews. Dragan shares a study he conducted on the topic and discusses the advantages of synchronous team collaboration.
January 19, 2023