Behind the scenes: Engineering @ Phocas

Phocas has undoubtedly become one of Australia’s leading data SaaS companies. The company has changed how people and companies manage data, allowing them to be more decisive and operate with confidence. 

With its success serving over 1700 companies and 20,000 people internationally, Phocas’ products play an important role to many. From data analytics, financial reporting, planning, budgeting, to even forecasting; Phocas does it all. It integrates critical business functions into an easy-to-use tool for business people and accountants. 

With an extensive and ever-growing product line, Phocas has seen a rapid increase in demand for its software over the past few years. 

That’s why at Phocas - innovation never stops. Every day presents a new challenge as the engineering team creates products that help customers make effective, data-backed decisions. 

From the outside, we view Phocas as one of the fastest homegrown SaaS companies, and it is! But have you ever wondered what happens on the inside?

 

What’s it like in Phocas’ engineering team?

 

At Phocas, it’s all about experimenting and coming up with new ideas. Imagine sitting and trading ideas with some of the brightest engineers to figure out what could be next for Phocas! Whether junior or senior, all engineers are encouraged to play an active role in the decision-making process. You’ll be able to see the direct impact of your work as it's implemented by thousands of companies around the world.

At the moment, Phocas is transitioning to modern stacks. The process of replacing basic systems with modern tech infrastructure presents many new challenges for engineers, creating the need to push limits and work their way through it.

The overarching goal is to set up a high-performance cloud data architecture that’s cost-effective while supporting streaming from thousands of different customers in a multitenant environment. 

 

At Phocas, it’s not just ‘teamwork’ 

 

When it comes to working together, it’s a whole different ball game at Phocas. You’ll collaborate with different departments and work towards one aim - enabling users to manage their data as efficiently as possible. And everyone works hand in hand to make this happen. 

Engineers collaborate with the accounting team to ensure that the product adheres to current accounting principles. They also interface with the marketing team to align the system’s features with the needs of the customer as well as the UI and design team to strike a balance between usability and functionality.

Phocas believes that key decisions should be made by people who are close to what's happening, which is why each team has a say in what they'd like to develop. This can be seen in the engineering department as engineers have a hand in deciding what tech stack to use, what features to push out, and even timelines for product updates.

Despite being in business for over two decades, Phocas’ product launch cadence is still very much like a hot new startup. Engineers get to learn something new every day while exploring new tech stacks while working to fix a lot of ‘world’s first’ problems and assessing the latest technology available to improve existing products and create new ones. 

Check out Phocas’ profile here.