In this chapter of Life at Belvo, we interview one of the company’s most smiley faces: Sergio, Software Engineer at Belvo’s Payments team, who shares with us how his team works to create something completely new in the Latin American market.
Traveler of the world, cheerful and eager to learn, Sergio found a perfect fit at Belvo. You’ll often find him asking multiple, deep questions during company meetings or visiting teammates in their offices across the world –and taking cool pictures with his drone while doing it. Curiosity is one good word to describe him: Sergio is constantly driven by new challenges, and always motivated to build something new.
It is not a coincidence that he is now part of the Payments team building Belvo’s brand-new set of solutions in this area. Building an entirely new payments infrastructure was definitely an attractive next step for him after working in multiple teams and projects at Belvo before.
Find out more about his day-a-day life as a Software Engineer in Belvo.
1. What do you do at Belvo?
I am an Engineer in the Payments team, which means I propose, design, implement, and maintain the line of payment products we’re building. Also, I get involved in security-related projects at every chance I have.
2. Can you describe your team’s mission and day-to-day responsibilities?
We want people to move money in a frictionless, secure and reliable way. To do so, we focus on defining and implementing different payment solutions in Latin America, such as enabling bank-to-bank payments.
Payments are our third solution. Belvo launched Data Aggregation first, and later, we added Enrichment. We’re constantly launching products that don’t exist in the region while doing it in a Belvoesque way – which involves many engineering and product challenges, such as scalability and treating Belvo like a platform instead of a separate set of products.
3. What is the tech stack that your team uses?
Mainly, Django and AWS. Datadog is helpful for monitoring, it helps us create dashboards and alerts to ensure everything is working as expected.
Recently, the infrastructure team migrated all services from Kubernetes to AWS ECS – it’s the first time I’m working with the latter and it is positive that the infrastructure configuration was delegated to the squad. This allows us to move faster while the team is growing and the services are scaling.
4. How is it working in your team?
Being part of the Payments squad feels like being in the early days of Belvo all over again. It feels like the team is a startup within a startup.
5. Where’s your team located and how do you sync with them?
My squad is all over the place. All the way from Mexico to the Czech Republic. I have peers in Argentina, Brazil, and Spain. While it is a unique experience, we need to be conscious that we need to have good and clear communication.
We do this by documenting the product from the business and tech perspective, creating how-to guides, and using public channels to keep our peers in the loop. We avoid having private conversations. This way someone in a different timezone can always have the necessary context if needed. Similarly, even though no one in our team is a native English speaker, we maintain all our products and comms in English. This allows us to work with people from all over the globe.
We have a daily standup in which we talk about current work, if we need any help or if we have blockers.
6. Have you done any in-person offsite? How do you bond with your team?
Earlier this year we had an offsite in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and I had the chance to meet people I’d only seen in video calls before.
I also have done several trips to visit the teams in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and Madrid. And soon we will have our first Payment squad offsite in Barcelona. I’ve been fortunate to travel to different countries and meet my colleagues across the world. This allows you to get to know who you are working with in a more personal way.
And in my case, I used my ‘work from any office’ perk for some of these trips!
7. What do you like the most about working at Belvo?
Working with my peers and doing so from all over the world.
First, everyone has a different background and set of skills that complement each other. For example, some people are really good at architecture or at code reviews. Others have deep knowledge and understanding of the language and have used it in different situations, for example, doing tips on async or scraping. On top of that, there’s always someone willing to help and share knowledge. Also, it’s fun and we have good chemistry even if we come from different parts of the world. This makes it easy to have a nice team culture.
With Belvo, I’ve had the chance to work from our offices in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Madrid, and Barcelona. And I hope I can do it from Colombia soon too since we recently opened an office there.
8. Where do you see yourself in 3 years?
Building, building, building.
One of my favorite things about my Belvo-journey so far is that I’ve always done something that I was not expecting to do. Not even six months before, and the outcome has been great so far. For example, before joining the company, I wanted to pursue a role 100% focused on security. However, I decided to give it a shot and joined as a Software Engineer.
During the last two and a half years, I’ve had the opportunity to work on things I wouldn’t have imagined before. I’ve done this along with different peers and across different verticals: Data Aggregation, Payments, and Foundation products. So keeping this trajectory in mind, I would rather keep it open ☺️
9. Why would you recommend someone to join Belvo?
We are trying to build something that doesn’t exist in Latin America. This is exciting from an engineering and product perspective. Besides, we have the chance to provide the “picks and shovels” for financial innovators in a region that needs them.
If you’d like to join us on the journey of building and securing the financial and payments infrastructure in Latin America, have a look at some of the roles we’re looking for here.
