About the company and the team
Founded in Scandinavia, Shoreline has employees distributed across multiple locations in the European time-zones, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the UK. We have offices in Denmark and Norway, but people in other countries work 100% remote, and most of our teams have members in several different locations. Video meetings, Slack chat and other remote collaboration are the norm. In larger meetings, office-based folks use the Meeting Owl (https://owllabs.com/products/meeting-owl-3). Our employees come from many countries and cultures. You will hear a variety of languages in the offices or at company get-togethers, but English is the lingua franca and is the official working language of the company.
Typical working hours across the company are 8am-4pm CET (so, eg, 7am-3pm in UK, Ireland and Portugal; 9am-5pm in Finland, Estonia, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere in EEST). Our aim is to ensure our platform is sufficiently robust that it rarely if ever needs out-of-hours development work. Still, since our customers operate 24/7, we do have a (paid) on-call rota for 3rd-line support that you would join once you have enough experience under your belt.
We have two SaaS products:
• An established market-leading “Design” tool, which uses agent-based modelling for simulating and optimising the design, location and build of a new wind farm (including optimising the setup for maintenance of over the wind farm’s expected 30 year life-time);
• A newer set of “Execution” tools for planning and management of wind farm maintenance and repair.
We plan and track our work using a lightweight low-ceremony version of Scrum run by the Engineering Managers. We place an emphasis on incremental delivery (typically behind feature flags) and equal treatment of different types of work (features, scalability enhancements, productivity and maintainability improvements, bug fixes, etc). Having a simple and transparent process in Engineering helps our colleagues in the rest of the business with their own planning, and allows the company to make better-informed prioritisation and trade-off decisions.
Our tech stack has evolved over time. There are currently a few different JavaScript frameworks on the front-end, though we are moving towards Angular across the board for web front end and React for mobile front end. Broadly, the back-end is currently JavaScript (Node.js) for the “Execution” product and Java (Spring Boot) for the “Design” product (which includes the “Shoresim” simulation engine). The data layer is MongoDB and MariaDB, though we are gradually migrating more towards the latter. Everything runs in AWS (as Docker containers on plain EC2 instances or in ECS clusters). We have a mixture of shared and per-customer environments.
Although we don’t have the same scalability challenges as some B2C businesses, our clients process sizeable amounts of data through our system. They also operate around the globe and around the clock. The wind farms they are building and operating are large complex weather-dependent projects, each representing many hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. The efficiency improvements our software brings to the planning and operation of wind farms (both offshore and on shore) are hugely valuable. Availability of our SaaS platform, along with its speed and the accuracy of its outputs, are mission critical to them. This means we care a lot about getting things right, and we put significant effort into code quality, automated testing and process refinement. At the same time, we have a large scope of features yet to create to fully serve the industry. Juggling between all the competing priorities can be hard, and we aren’t always exactly where we want to be, but most people on the team would say we are moving in the right direction.
There is a fair amount to learn to get up to speed with the offshore wind industry, but a lot of what our customers do is quite interesting to someone with an “engineering” mindset, and there is significant satisfaction to being involved in the creation and operation of new sources of clean energy.
