Hello!

My name is Alik Kurdyukov, I am United Traders CTO. You can find out a little about me in my profile. Recently, we are increasing the pace of recruiting IT people into a company and are faced with a problem: many people know us as a “Fin” company, but very few people know it as a “Tech”. Therefore now we have a blog on Habré.

In this post I want to talk about how we are arranged by the development. And I will be happy to answer questions in the comments.

About company

United Traders is a fintech company that creates digital products for trading in the stock market (NYSE, NASDAQ, CME) and investments (IPO, OTC and own investment products). We develop software for traders, web platforms, mobile applications, financial algorithms and our cryptocurrency exchange.

The IT team is responsible for the code for the following United Traders digital ecosystem products:

• UTEX - a cryptocurrency exchange with an adaptive interface (beginners / professionals).
• UT Investment is an investment web platform with a showcase of exclusive ideas.
• Aurora is a platform for trading on various exchanges.
• UT Magazine is an information portal about trading and finance.
• Answr - an encyclopedia with the payment of the work of the authors in cryptocurrency.

Development

We work in a dynamic market. Therefore, product teams are “sharpened” under a flexible iterative approach. The cycle of iterations of Scrum and Kanban cadences is 1 week.

Development is closely related to the business. Developers are involved in making product decisions. Food teams work as part of HADI cycles. The main thing is the result, so for the formed products we make detailed reviews of the entire code, even typesettings and try to allocate time for refactoring and technical improvements.

Distributed team

Our company has a flat structure, now the direct leader of all IT people is CTO. The team works remotely, distributed in Russia and neighboring countries:

• Moscow
• St. Petersburg
• Komsomolsk-on-Amur
• Kaliningrad
• Taganrog
• Kishinev
• Ryazan
• Kolomna
• Cherepovets
• Murmansk
• Tallinn
• Vilnius
• Minsk
• Vitebsk

Communications are carried out using:

• Slack as a corporate chat,
• JIRA and Trello as trackers.
• Sococo as a voice and video communication tool, virtual office.

The company finances the development of employees, welcomes presentations at conferences and meetings (JPoint, Joker, HighLoad, RIT ++).

Development teams

We have more than 30 professional developers, testers, OPS-engineers, designers, layout designers. All of our IT people interact with each other every day in small teams:

Platform
Develops general services of the company: payment acceptance, internal accounting, affiliate program, etc. Mostly used by java and kotlin.

UTEX
Develops a stock exchange for trading cryptocurrencies. 2 teams are working on the product: Team Back, Team Front. Kotlin, Java, Erlang, Rust, React, Redux, Apollo are used.

Statements
Improves reporting system on trade and management of trade parameters. Used by Kotlin and Java.

Aurora
Works on the development of the Aurora client trading platform, which is represented by servers for various purposes, as well as client and manager terminals. C # is used.

Operations
The main task of OPS engineers is to help DEV teams with the following issues:
exploitation of test and combat environments
customization and support of pipeline development from the organization of the development environment to roll out.
DevOps principles are used. Tools: Ansible, OpenShift, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, Docker, CentOS.

Autotesting
Help development teams maintain a high level of quality. Work with integration auto-tests. Tools: Spock, Spek, Allure.

UX / UI designers
Explore user preferences, create designs for all development projects in UT, work on usability.

Human capital
They help to attract people with whom we coincide in values, and contribute to the development of development teams.
Architecture, technology stacks, practices
The architecture of our entire ecosystem is built on microservices with all their advantages and disadvantages. For microservice interaction we use REST, gRPC, Kafka. We have discovery, configuration service. We use circuit breaker and other patterns.

Our development stack:

• JVM - Kotlin, Java8, Spring Boot2, Hibername, PostgeSQL
• Frontend - TypeScript, React, Redux, ReduxSaga, Apollo GraphQL
• .NET - C # 7, .NET Framework 4.7.1, WPF, Castle Windsor
• Rust - Tokio, Actix
• Erlang

Engineering practices:

• CI / CD is based on Jenkins and Ansible,
• For all languages ​​there is a code style, usually checked automatically,
• There is a mandatory code review for all projects except quick MVPs,

Most projects have 3 levels of auto tests:

• unit tests for code
• integration tests for running artifacts in isolation,
• system tests for artifact groups - testers and developers are working on these tests.

We try to use new technologies if they can help us in solving problems, but it is customary to “sell” technology to the team. For example, over the last year we started using Rust, GraphQL, ClickHouse.

Work style

At UT, we are used to not just sawing tasks, but proposing improvements along the way and asking questions. We have the “30 Minutes Rule”: if you encounter a difficulty that you cannot solve in half an hour, it makes sense to ask a question to the Slack-chat team, someone will help you with the solution or tell you where to dig. And we are sure that the one who took on the task will necessarily complete it.

In general, we have a great team, we will be happy if one day you find yourself in it, and from today for we will tell you how we make United Traders not just financial, but fintech company.