The Wire Team plays a pivotal, yet behind-the-scenes, role at CAST AI. While they may not directly manage the products that customers purchase, the value they create is indispensable for making all of CAST AI's offerings functional and user-friendly.
The team develops a wide array of user-facing features that contribute to a fully realized platform. This includes designing robust authorization and authentication flows, managing user and organization accounts, as well as implementing notifications and audit systems, among other tasks. Furthermore, they create frameworks and tools that enable other internal teams to seamlessly incorporate these capabilities into their own products.
In addition to these tasks, the Wire Team is also responsible for implementing enterprise-level Single Sign-On (SSO) integrations as a self-service feature. They work on integrating billing systems with various cloud marketplaces and oversee the management of platform entitlements.
In essence, the Wire Team's efforts are crucial to the very existence of our platform. Their mission is to elevate the user experience, regardless of whether the customer is a small startup or a large enterprise.
How Do We Operate? At CAST AI, we specifically seek out Software Engineers rather than Software Developers. This distinction is not merely semantic; it underscores a profound difference in responsibilities and expectations. Let's delve into what sets the two apart.
A Software Engineer is responsible for overseeing the entire lifecycle of a system, starting from its conceptual genesis to its continuous delivery of value to customers. When a high-value feature is identified and properly prioritized, an engineer takes ownership. The task entails not just coding but also meticulously reviewing the technical architecture, design, and feasibility of the feature. Beyond functional aspects, we pay heed to:
Testability Adaptability Performance and Scalability Deployment and Compatibility Debugging and Operational Management. Throughout this comprehensive process, collaboration is key. While engineers are accountable for end-to-end delivery, they are also encouraged to consult with peers to arrive at the most effective solutions. The capacity to work both independently and as part of a team is essential.
To expedite delivery, we have devised a suite of proprietary tools that assist us in various aspects of development. Engineers periodically switch roles to write automated end-to-end tests, optimise our GitOps-enabled continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, or fine-tune our observability stack. We even have a rotation for passive on-call duties to promptly address any issues that arise within our codebase.
It's worth noting that we do not employ separate DevOps or QA roles within our engineering team. Self-reliance is vital: we automate everything and construct our own tooling. Therefore, a broad systems-oriented perspective - going beyond mere software development - is indispensable for success within our team.
Our mantra is straightforward: we build it, we test it, we ship it and we operate it.
Here are some of the tools we use daily: GoLang is our language Kubernetes is our core product AWS, GCP, and Azure are the clouds we operate Postgres and cloud object storage for persistence GCP PubSub for messaging GRPC and REST APIs We use GitLab CI with ArgoCD as our GitOps CD engine Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo for observability Deployment charts are written in Helm. Having experience with these tools is not a strict prerequisite for the ideal candidate, but it does offer a competitive edge.