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 · 10 min
Keeping Customers Informed During Incidents with Prometheus
Maintaining customer satisfaction during incidents is crucial for any business. In this blogpost, Piotr shares how we leverage Prometheus to expose business metrics in a secure and cost-effective way to keep customers informed and happy during those stressful situations.
May 24, 2023
Blogs · 4 min
.tech Podcast - The core components of container systems
Michael Kerrisk is a Linux expert and trainer. He joins us to explain what containers are and deep dive into the four core components of containers: namespaces, capabilities, cgroups and seccomp. He also draws parallels on how they are used by Docker to power container systems as we know them today.
May 17, 2023
Blogs · 5 min
How to inspect & manipulate network packets in AWS with Gateway Load Balancer
In this post, Michał walks you through a sample setup of the AWS Gateway Load Balancer. We will provision the infrastructure using Terraform, write a simple virtual appliance application and show it all in action. He demonstrates how this service can be used to route network traffic through a virtual appliance where each network packet can be inspected, modified, or dropped.
May 11, 2023