Kriya is a fintech business lendery that was founded in 2011 (originally known as MarketFinance). We build our funding solutions in-house as part of our engineering function. Personally, I have worked at Kriya for around 8 months now, focussing specifically on our business loans solution.

OUR SOLUTIONS

Kriya offers a range of funding solutions to suit the different needs of SMEs. Our first solution was invoice finance but we now also offer business loans and more. All of these are built in-house.The Tech team focuses on building our smart online platform that allows users to apply for or invest in these funding solutions, manage their Kriya accounts and access funds.

One of the great benefits of this is you get a lot of experience in various different systems. Payments systems which involve the movement of money, SaaS Line Of Business applications which allow the internal teams to advance funds to users as well as online websites and applications which are our users’ entry point into our product journey.

The Engineering team’s focus is to build these solutions out further to enhance them; build any new products that allow us to innovate within the business finance market and maintain our current solutions for business as usual too.

SQUADS AND TRIBES

Kriya uses the squads and tribes model for engineering, which you may be familiar with. There are around 20 developers at Kriya and these developers are split into smaller squads based around the business concern they work on. I work in the loans squad, we also have a squad that focuses on invoice finance and another squad that focuses on shared concerns. Overall, our tribe is engineering which encompasses all engineering squads, including various data engineers and product managers.

Each squad works within an agile methodology, using JIRA to enable that. We collaborate with all our fellow engineers and work together to complete new features and stories, fix bugs and enable the business to move quickly. Our work is paramount to allowing Kriya achieve our vision. Without our software the business would not have the capability.

TECHNOLOGY

To be as fast-moving as we want to be in tech, we are constantly adapting and picking up new tech to allow us to build the best solutions we can. We regularly evaluate new technologies, libraries and languages in this regard. However, we do have a set of standard tech we tend to use.

On the front-end we use react with typescript, although our older front-end pieces are in regular react and a very small amount of angularJS. We use the standard front-end technologies that tend to go with react such as webpack, redux, npm, etc.

On the back-end, we use C#/.NET. We use a lot of SQL Server with some CosmosDB and Redis amongst our various services. We use Azure Service bus for loosely coupled message communication between services and we also use RESTful communication between our services. All of this is deployed to the cloud in Azure. The overall architecture of our system is a distributed Service Oriented Architecture, and we are striving more and more to make this a proper microservices architecture. The majority of our architecture is event driven too. Squads take ownership of various services that fall into their business domain and work on them day-to-day.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A KRIYA ENGINEER

Given the current circumstances, the Tech team works remotely, so the day for me starts with a coffee and turning my laptop on! We work on our tasks until standup which is when each engineer, product manager and designer in the squad gives an update on what they’re working on. After that, we go back to working on our tasks until they’re completed. We release very regularly at Kriya, so as soon as your task is finished, it will be released to customers in a matter of minutes.

There are a few other collaborative meetings such as the architecture working group where each engineer, no matter their seniority, gets a say on the architecture of our current and future systems. We also get engineers to take ownership of features so that they have a big say on how those features are built, whether we are building them the right way, or even if they're the right feature to build in the first place. This might mean spending some time speaking to stakeholders of the feature, but most of our time is spent writing code and creating new features and solutions!

We have the usual agile meetings such as backlog grooming and sizing sessions, and at the end of every sprint we have a retrospective to find ways to improve our future sprints as well as to give credit to people who did well.

Working at Kriya as an engineer means you have a say in what the business is doing and your everyday work is very important to the overall vision. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, find your place in our Tech team here.