Meet the Moonfarians by Elena Melashchenko

Automatic Summary

Inside More Fair: A Closer Look with Elena and Milena

Ever wondered about the people behind your favorite fintech companies? Our goal is to shed light on that topic, using More Fair as our case study. Meet Elena (a tech recruiter stationed in Berlin since January 2022) and Yelena (a principal engineer at More Fair who's been at it for over 10 years). Elena and Yellena currently work together under the same tech hub, More Fair, and Passionate about technology and its impact, they are here to share their experience and insights about the company.

About More Fair

More Fair, a fintech company focusing on the private equity field, is revolutionizing the investment markets. Seeking to make the private equity market more accessible by mitigating obstacles such as high investment price tags and complex processes, More Fair is transforming the investment landscape one step at a time.

Bringing together a diverse workforce of over 170 employees from over 40 nations, More Fair is not only doing great things in the tech world but also promoting diversity in the workplace. With offices in Berlin, London, New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore, they cater to a global clientele, each with their unique investment needs.

More Fair’s Technology

As a participant in the tech revolution, More Fair understands the need for a progressive and innovative platform to cater to its growing clientele. Consequently, More Fair's Engineering team has grown from just a handful of coders to a considerable number of experts from more than 30 countries around the world. They've built and continue to enhance a digitalized platform that enables individuals to invest in private equity funds seamlessly.

In a bid to maintain a high level of adaptability and reliability amidst their growth, More Fair has shifted from a monolithic application towards modular backend and microservices. They've achieved this by extracting critical functionality into independent microservices and establishing asynchronous communication between them. More Fair has made it easier for the engineering teams to focus on their specialized features.

The Working Culture at More Fair

Quantity does not compromise quality in any way at More Fair. They pride themselves on their teamwork ethic, integrity, and drive towards growth. Learning is a continuous part of their culture, fueled by a self-development budget, consistent feedback, and development sessions. The culture goes beyond just work. There is a strong emphasis on community – achieving goals collectively and supporting one another every step of the way.

Hiring at More Fair

Thinking about joining this incredible team? More Fair's application process is transparent and applicant-friendly. It comprises five main steps:

  1. Initial call with a recruiter
  2. Submission of a technical task
  3. Calling with the hiring manager
  4. Technical Interview
  5. Cultural fit assessment


More Fair’s main business language is English. It is important for applicants to express themselves comfortably in English. Applications are generally handled within three business days.

To wrap up, both Elena and Milena expressed their gratitude for being part of such a vibrant and empowering company. They managed to answer a wide array of questions about the organization, its culture, its teams, and its recruitment process. If you're as fascinated by the prospects of joining More Fair as we are, this comprehensive guide might be just what you needed!

Contact and Follow More Fair

You can stay updated with what More Fair is doing on their website and their LinkedIn profile. This provides great insights into what the company is up to and what they have in store for the future.

If you have any questions or inquiries regarding their hiring process, do not hesitate to get in touch with them. The More Fair team will be delighted to assist you in any way possible.

As Elena and Milena would say, 'Wishing you all a great day, and thanks for joining us!'


Video Transcription

So, hi, everyone. Uh my name is Elena. We are here today to talk more about Mo Fair and uh presenting myself to, to you guys. So I am a Brazilian living in Berlin since January 2022 when I joined More Fair.And I've been a tech recruiter for about eight years now. I used to joke about that being a tech recruit even when tech was not in the job ladder. Although I don't know how to develop. I love technology and seeing the impact of my job tech teams.

So then that's my turn. Hi, everyone. My name is Yelena and I work as a principal engineer at MF originally, I'm from Ukraine, but since 2015, I live and work in Berlin, Germany. I have more than 10 years experience in soft uh software engineering and with MFA, I'm already for four years as you, you can see, I have started as a working at M as a senior full engineer and at the moment, I'm in charge of the whole development department a little bit about me as you can see on the screen, I'm a huge fan of Korean culture in particularly K pop and K dramas.

So to be honest, I have a really extensive experience in watching them. So you will have if you have some questions also related to that, feel free to reach out.

Nice, thanks Selena. So uh to talk more about Moon Fair. So what is Moon Fair? MOFA is a fintech company that works in the private equity field. But what is private equity you might ask? So when talking about investments, we have different markets such as the public and the private one, the public market is the one where we could buy stocks and crypto just by downloading an app from companies that have gone through the IP OS. So when talking about private equity, uh we are mainly talking about companies that they haven't gone through the IP O yet but still needs investment. So what more fair wants to do? We want to impact the private equity market. What is usually difficult to access because of like the high prices of investments, enabling individuals to access those investments, not only by reducing the price uh but also like making the process to invest a lot easier and helping the investors to build their own portfolios.

So about our company, we have now 100 and 70 employees, more than 40 nationalities in the company and offices in, in different regions such as Berlin, where we are headquartered, London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. Considering that we are in different regions. We have to understand the legal aspects and process to invest in different countries. Also considering the different needs that users from the regions might have. So, since we are in different countries and we plan to keep growing, we need to rest structure, not only our team but also our platform. So we can be able to attend our investors needs and innovate at the same time and to talk more about our timeline. Moe was founded in 2016 by Stan Post who are, who is our CEO. And after the seed round, which was in 2017, we established the company and launched our product in 2000 and 18. Then after uh after we established presence in Hong Kong in 2019, we went through a new series round in 2021 the year when we received our Series CS uh round. And what about our engineering team, Elena?

Sure, that's actually a good question, Milena. When I joined the team in June 2018, we have been just two engineers uh in house actually including me and around six or seven engineers in Qs back then. And since then, we have grown significantly. And in total, right now, we have around uh 100 actually members in entire product and de department consist of product owners, designers, Q A engineers, security and site reliability engineers and B I. Uh each member actually of our team uh have different experience, knowledge, background and their own history. All of us coming from more than over the 30 countries around the world and experts in it field joined more fair in helping to build a digital platform that allows individuals to invest in the private equity funds. So when it comes to um our engineering team structure, as you can see, it's um pretty big in the beginning. Uh We've been just very small one team back then, but we started getting bigger and bigger and uh we came to the decision that it really needs uh like and require actually some changes.

So we adopted the Spotify model and dividing uh teams into tribes and squads to improve, not only our solution but also um how our teams work and collaborate with each other. So at the moment, as you can see on the screen, we have around 14 teams in total and we keep growing and plan to establish several teams uh in the uh nearest future. Um As for the application we build um in the few words, it's a digitalized platform that enables the individual individuals to go through uh the whole process necessary for investing fully online. We continue to improve in it. We uh develop extra functionality based on different customers feedbacks and make the process of investing through our application as easy as possible. And I would like to share that just this week, we have released a really completely rebranded website, which is even better looking and easier to use.

It was really a huge, tremendous collaboration between all of our cross functional teams, designers and engineers. And to be honest, I would like to say that I'm really proud to be the part of uh such actually amazing team. Then a little bit more details about um the process, how it actually looks on our website. Uh Like basically how to invest through our application. As you can see, it's a pretty straightforward users can register on our uh our application go through the uh KOC verification process which stands for know your customers. And uh then they will be asked to go through the identification and questionnaire which is will clarify if they are actually eligible, invest into uh private equity funds. They will be able to review different information regarding available funds on our application request, an allocation and sign documents fully online. And I believe that I won't surprise you too much with the text stack we have chosen because it's quite popular and fits our needs perfectly.

We use no J with typescript on the back end and we use React Chess with typescript on the front end from the database standpoint. We decided to use my and with a cloud solution, we went with uh a double S. But when it comes to the current challenges, we have were to mention that in the beginning as many companies. Uh does that as well? We use the monolithic first strategy and the reasons behind that were the next. Uh first of all, it's a speed and also uh with faster collection of the feedbacks, quicker adjustments and clear back then uh boundaries that and also not always the complete requirements, right from the beginning, also factoring functionality between services would have made life much more difficult for us than doing that in the monolith.

But when the application started to grow and over the time, the amount of the functionality at various business um cases started increasing, we came to the conclusion that actually it's a time to move away from the monolithic uh application to the modular backend and microservices.

We decided to use the main driven design approach and focus on the developing large models by separating them into different bounded contexts and explicit, discovering them their interactions as well as extracting critical functionality into independent microservices and focus on creating proper asynchronous communication between them.

They've enabled actually to make uh our teams um more, much more independent and enable engineers to exactly focus on the features. Uh Their team owns to be honest, none of those big steps and changes wouldn't be possible if we wouldn't have really a great team with a strong culture. And in our company, do you agree about that, Milena?

Yes, totally agree with you, Elena. And I think this is the most important aspect uh about moon fair and actually my favorite one. So talking about our values. We have four of them. The very first is about ownership. But you might ask like me now, what is ownership to MOFA? So basically when talking about ownership, we are talking about like how much effort we put into our tasks. If I see a problem that is not related to my area or my job role, I won't turn around and let go. I will tell my leader my teammates so I can guarantee the problem is going to be solved. So sometimes it can solve the problem by myself. Uh Like if it's required coding, for example. Uh But I can go to Elena and tell my opinions, perceptions and ask for her help and about growth. So uh we seek for growth and improvement and how do we do that? We have a self development budget, uh weekly teaching improve. Uh And actually we provide s annuals feedbacks and development sessions about integrity. This is actually my favorite culture aspects in the whole company. We have regularly Monday townhouse where we have like reports, dashboards, all the business.

And I think that this is really important so we could understand how much impact our role has to the company. Uh We also provide like forward feedback to each other. What help us to understand what we need to improve, but not only that, what do we need to keep doing? So about community. That is, is like our fourth value. So there is no such thing as like doing things by ourselves. Like just by yourself, we work in teams, we deliver together, we support each other and we are encouraged to keep like the bigger picturing in mind. This is one of the favorites. Uh Like one of the values. Actually, I, I already told this is my favorite. But also I could see like from the very beginning when I was joining like my interview process for more fair. So talking about like the interview process, uh I can share with you how our software engineering process look like. And it consists in about like five steps. So first you could have a call with a recruiter like me and I wish I could get like to know more of you doing this stuff actually. And then we have the coil task so that the CAD task is the only hands on technical challenge that we have during our interview process. In this step, we will assess your coding skills, understanding how do you use logic to complete challenges?

After that, you would have the opportunity to know your possible future manager in the hiring manager call. This call is focused not only in getting to know more about your previous experiences, but also for your hiring manager to see how you could be an add to the team. I always suggest also that you come prepared with some questions. So you could understand also if we are offering the type of challenging that you actually want. So about our technical interview, we don't do like a whiteboard assessment. Uh We are mainly going to ask about like some engineering concepts and how do you use in your daily basis? Talking about the final steps that we named as culture calls, this culture calls uh are for you to get to know the product team and also the VP of engineering in the software engineering case. As I've already mentioned, it, it would be like very important for you to bring some questions to this staff. So we could share different perspectives from the business with you and talking about like, I know that this could be a lot of information. And uh I mean, if you guys have any questions curiosities, please feel free to ask us and we'll be here like to, to answer you. So let me check the chat to see if we actually have some questions. OK. OK.

So it seems that we actually don't have uh any questions until now. Um So I I we actually came prepared to some questions that you guys might uh might have. So basically, like the main questions that we receive from candidates are like, what languages should I speak? So, in fair, the main language that we speak is English. This is the language that you should be prepared to speak during all the inter interview process with us. And also when joining the company and talking about like what you could expect about your application. We actually aim to respond all the applications within like three business days. And who can I contact if I have more questions about the hiring process? Like the interview process, you can get in touch with me also and with the recruitment team by the emails that we have in the presentation. So uh I'm actually curious about something. So Elena, what is your favorite value about room?

Mm That's a good question. Um So I think my one of my favorite ones is growth. So actually the value stands for rebuilding business by building people. And as I mentioned in the beginning, um my career here has started as a senior FTE engineer and then I moved to onto the team leader position in one of our teams. And at the moment, I lead the entire development department, the company supports various aspects of the personal growth and from the providing a fairly extensive budget for for the courses and cer certifications, as you mentioned before to clearly document the criteria for what is expected of a team member for being promoted.

In addition, twice a year, we conduct 360 feedback to help assess a member's performance by peers to help the individual grow and achieve their personal goals, becoming the team leader or moving from developer to the devolves um positions and more is all possible at Moon Fair.

And as long as you are willing to do that and eager to do that. Uh Just that's on the matter to uh tell that and try uh yourself uh in the new position. And actually I have one more question to you, Mia. Um So why did you decide to join, move for this year? And what actually made you to relocate to Germany?

Nice, nice question. So I've made this decision because I could see like during my interview process that everyone was not only assessing my skills but also understanding how could I add the team, like culturally saying, and I felt comfortable to tell about like all my skills, even the ones that I knew that I needed to improve that it was not like super great and I could see it not only from my leader but also from the team members that was interviewing me, that they would be for me there when I, when I need it, like when I need their support.

And I think actually this is one of the main important things for me when considering like a new opportunity when I was considering the opportunity about Mo Fair. And this is why actually I made my decision to relocate to Germany because relocating to Germany and working for Mo Fair. I knew that this wouldn't be like actually a lonely journey. So this is actually my reason to join Move Air and now we would like you guys uh thank you for your attention. And if you would like to see more about our, our uh about us about the company. Just check out our website and follow us on linkedin. We have a lot of more information there, not only about like the interview process but about the company and thanks a lot and we wish you a great day. And of course, if you want like to ask us anything, just put in the chat below and we are super happy to answer.

Thank you very much, everyone for attending our call. Have a great day then.

Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you, Elena. Have a great day

guys. Bye Elena. Bye bye.