Technology @ UW

The company’s products may be quite “non-digital” in nature, but its strategy is not. UW’s success is predicated on the success of its technology platform, which is largely cloud-native and distinctively modern – especially by the standards of most “utility providers” in the market. Built almost completely in-house using standard (though team-specific) agile development practices, its operational IT systems are based primarily on open-source solutions and state of the art tech. Internal software systems employ event-driven architectures more often than not, and are composed predominantly of distributed microservices written in Go and connected using asynchronous message passing. Event sourcing is the default choice for backend system design, with business events modelled using protobuf and shared via pub/sub systems (mainly Kafka). Frontend systems tend to be built using React (in either Typescript or modern Javascript), while synchronous APIs are exposed via GraphQL or, for high-performance, purely internal systems, GRPC. Aside from legacy systems that have yet to be replaced, virtually everything runs in Kubernetes clusters hosted both on-prem and in the cloud.

How we see ourselves in Technology:

• We care about how we deliver and who we work with – work should be rewarding personally, and not just in terms of a pay check

• We enjoy working on interesting problems with smart people and know that if it was easy, it wouldn't be fun

• We deliver quickly by keeping processes light and enabling autonomy

• We’ve never believed in ivory tower leadership; managers should be hands-on and roll up their sleeves when needed to mentor and support

• We encourage experimentation, don’t appreciate egos, and believe in (friendly) debate, collaboration and learning

• We operate what we build – which means reliability is key and devops is part of every engineer’s job description

• With 300+ people in Tech, as a team we’re very much backend-heavy in terms of engineering fire power; but with UX, Product and Data now growing quickly we’re in the right place to push on and hire people who will take ownership of how we define and deliver best-in-class experiences to our customers

Engineering at UW:

• Our philosophy revolves around getting things done. We deliver with small, fully autonomous teams that have real ownership of their products using a cutting edge stack in a best-idea-wins meritocracy.
• We use the best tool for the job. Go and React are our bread and butter but nothing is stopping you from reaching for something else if it does it better.