Explore our Westwing Tech Department
Who we are
When people hear Westwing, they immediately think of furniture, lifestyle products, marketing, and logistics. But the core of Westwing is E-Commerce and our Tech department makes it all possible!
Our Tech team is one of our key components for our success. With more than 270 employees and 40+ nationalities, it is one of the most diverse teams at Westwing. We have two main hubs, Munich and Warsaw, a recently opened Tech Hub in Berlin, and around 40 team members working remotely from different locations. In 2021, we scaled up the team hiring over 160 new employees and proudly restructured our entire Tech department. Taking inspiration from the “Spotify Model”, we adopted tribes as an organizational model, mirroring our business units. The new structure is the base for our strategy.
Our Tech department consists of four main areas: Consumer, Services, Operations and Security, each area is made of tribes, these consisting of different teams. We work in 30+ teams and 15 tribes of Software Engineers, QA Automation Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Data Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Product Managers, UI/UX/3D Designers, Support and IT Specialists.
What we do
We create beautiful sites and 130+ apps to excite and inspire our customers as well as innovative services and tools to support our teams. We operate and maintain all those systems software and hardware, making sure that Westwing can do business now and in the future!
We equip and enable our colleagues to work effectively and securely, we manage our payment providers, monitor fraud, we talk with our customers to understand how they use our website/apps (UX research). Above all, we make sure to inspire our customers everyday by making our website accessible and more beautiful day by day.
We love what we do every single day!
Our Tech Stack
Whenever we talk about our technology stack, we talk about the two main languages that we use: PHP and JavaScript. That’s our core and base that powers the majority of systems at Westwing with very good efforts. We work hard to keep those systems up-to-date and are proud that most of them are running on the most up-to-date versions.
We put a big focus on the quality and maintainability of our code and that’s why TypeScript became the de facto standard for our JavaScript-based application — both on the frontend and backend. But those two technologies are not all we have! We develop our native apps in-house for both Android and iOS with Kotlin and Swift. As internal tools we sometimes use GoLang, Python, or Elixir. We have services running on Scala and others in Python. Generally, we always aim to pick the best tool for a specific result.
On the infrastructure side, in 2021 we pushed heavily to the cloud and migrated the remaining systems from our data center. We started this journey already more than 5 years ago and since then we have been using AWS a lot to build highly available and scalable systems which support Westwing’s business needs.
We already proved with multiple high traffic days, for example Black Friday, that our systems are stable and support our business well in inspiring our customers.
We heavily believe in the DevOps culture and automation so almost the entire infrastructure is managed with Terraform and automated pipelines. The same applies for all development tasks — we work with GitLab CI and Jenkins to automate repetitive tasks and automatically check the quality of the code that we write. Automated tests and static code analysis help us to maintain this state.
We are currently working on our own TechRadar where you will be able to deep dive into what we use so stay tuned!
Our Working Mode
During the pandemic, our Westwing Tech team has proven that hybrid working modes (combining in-office work with Home-Office) can produce strong business results, this is why we decided to adopt a non-office centric model post-pandemic. The non-office centric model is based on a high performing and collaborative tech organization. To foster team cohesion and collaboration, we have a few office weeks per year. For the rest of the year, our Tech team members have a great deal of flexibility to determine their own work location. We envision continuing a flexible and trust-based workplace as the norm, not the exception. To meet the individual needs of each Tech team member, we have removed the obligation to come to our office buildings on a regular basis. This means that each individual can decide for themselves when and how regularly they want to come to the office, and they will also be given greater freedom about where they want to live. Non-office days can be performed from almost anywhere.
Do you want to work with us? We are currently looking for a number of Tech experts! Please find our roles here.
We are looking forward to your application!
Text: Andrea Galantucci
