A week in the life of Empatica’s Cloud Team

“Eat-sleep-code-repeat.”

If you are not in the software engineering field, you might almost believe this statement to be true in the lives of all developers. For some programmers, it may be so, but here at Empatica, this is not the case.

We asked some of our Cloud Engineers, Rodrigo and Giorgio, what their weekly life looks like, and what they love the most about their team.

We hope you find it insightful and that it inspires you to join us!

Coding, and more

Since we are a full-stack company, our Cloud Team is involved in many different tasks, with a focus on designing, building, and maintaining a scalable, reliable, and secure architecture, capable of supporting both our consumers and the research ecosystem.

The team handles high volumes of data (up to many terabytes per day) that is collected by our wearables, and this is then processed and served to our clients to help them with research, analysis, and more. For example, our devices (the E4 and EmbracePlus) are used in the development of digital biomarkers, and the data collected during clinical trials need to be constantly accessible by researchers to understand the effectiveness of treatments and to monitor participant adherence, Our Cloud makes this possible by feeding the information directly to our Empatica Care platform.

Our Cloud engineers are involved in crafting the architecture of this and other platforms, and their evolution to becoming one of the leading platforms for decentralized clinical trials, remote patient monitoring, and epilepsy management.

Day-to-day life

Rodrigo, our Full Stack Engineer, says you can expect plenty of different activities happening within the team from one day to the other, erasing the risk of being bored by working on the same tasks over and over again. For example, aside from the standard routine of most software engineering teams such as the daily standups, the debriefs with the team, and all the other Agile ceremonies, his job covers a range of different areas.

In his words:

“My duties range from front-end development (with React and Angular) for building web applications to empower our internal (Empaticans) and external customers; lots of backend development (with Go), towards building new APIs to be used in our applications; a good bit of data engineering (with Python and serverless with Lambda) to daily process massive amounts of data coming from our wearables; and finally, a large amount of infrastructure work (with AWS), to deploy and manage our applications.”

Giorgio, who is a Frontend Engineer, says that aside from the aforementioned daily team meetings, he works mainly on the frontend and on the backend related to it. Daily, his time is split between developing new features, fixing bugs, doing code reviews, and helping other teammates.

As an Empatican, a core value is to care about the quality of our work and by extension, our products, so all the work of the team goes through many tests, starting from the development phase with the unit and E2E tests, and also handing new features to the Quality Assurance (QA) team.

The first fully remote team in Empatica

One fun fact about our Cloud Team is that it is the first fully remote team at Empatica, with its members currently based in over 3 different time zones, which is also a reflection of Empatica’s current hybrid work model.

This, however, does not prevent them from bonding; even if they work from home, they converge occasionally in the Milan office to spend quality time with colleagues from different teams and even grab an after-work beer or two with peers!

What makes the team awesome

Beyond the variety of the work and the flexibility of the working model, there are some other things that make the team stand out for our Cloud engineers.

For Rodrigo, “the Cloud Team is definitely one you would enjoy spending some good time working with. There you can find people with many different backgrounds and skillsets, and who are always ready to learn something new - you can be sure we are always learning new things while working here”.

Giorgio feels the same way: “I love the fact that since the Cloud Team is sort of an “umbrella team” that handles many different areas, our knowledge is incredibly diverse from a technical perspective. This allows each of us to learn loads and grow on a day-to-day basis.”

Our customers’ needs are constantly evolving, and it so happens sometimes, that a quick shift in approach from what the team planned originally is required. As a result, it becomes necessary not to become stuck on one concept, but to be flexible enough to quickly adapt to clients’ requirements and new opportunities. This gives each member of the team the chance to think about the product as a whole while working on tasks, allowing room for improvements at any stage of the process if necessary.

For Giorgio and Rodrigo, these are the things that make the team awesome and absolutely worth joining!

Want to be a part of the Cloud Team?

Are you looking for a remote tech job and found the weekly life of our Cloud Team exciting? There’s always room for talented engineers, so go ahead and take a look at all our open positions.

And if you are curious to hear more about what makes working at Empatica so special, read the 6 things we love about working here.