Kisi’s Tech Stack

Curious to know more about the Kisi product organization and our tech stack? Look no further!

Our product organization has decided to separate itself into dedicated product teams with very clear ownership of their product. We currently have more than 20 fantastic engineers, representing more than 10 different nationalities! There’s a flat hierarchy (work alongside our co-founder and CTO, Carl!), a strong sense of ownership, and the freedom to get creative. We do 2x Hack Weeks per year, where you can dedicate the full week to any project you believe can add value. At Kisi, we try to limit meetings as much as possible, so you can have dedicated focus time.

“We aim to keep things simple. Our quarterly and yearly goals and how every one of us can contribute to the best of their abilities form our North Star. We turn our goals into product initiatives and assign ownership. Beyond that, our teams have the freedom to choose how to work best and achieve our goals.” - Carl, CTO

API Team

We are a remote team spanning the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Our mission is to build a rock-solid and scalable public API that powers physical security systems anywhere in the world. We also build and maintain internal tooling for various points of our API’s lifecycle to keep the API running like a well-oiled truck engine. We are at the core of our product.

Stack:

• Our goal is to build a great API for internal and external stakeholders. While we intend to stick with Ruby as our main framework, we don’t mind if you don’t have experience with it. We’ll help you pick it up.
• Main framework: Ruby on Rails
• Main databases: Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud SQL
• Other notable services: BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Pub/Sub
• One amazing tool we built is an internal library to generate our API documentation from a Ruby DSL, and use the same to test our endpoints for compliance

Web Team

We enable our users to manage access to their spaces through our web app. For our end users, we focus on building a web app that covers their need for accessing doors shared with them. For our admins, we focus on building a web app that facilitates access management and empowers them to quickly gain insights into what is going on in their spaces, including building dashboards, auditing access trails, and configuring access restrictions and integrations.

Stack:

• JavaScript, but well underway migrating to TypeScript
• Recent React versions (and eager to keep up!)
• Various UI frameworks to craft dashboards

Embedded hardware and firmware (IoT) Team

We develop and maintain firmware and hardware for Kisi's devices: Controllers, readers, and any new hardware product (e.g., wireless contact sensor). We also design new hardware and play a role in SCM and choosing the right components for Kisi products. We work closely with QA, API, and Mobile teams. Our team is based in Stockholm and New York.

We also create custom production processes to ensure high-quality manufacturing and shipping of our devices.

We design our hardware from scratch and we are very proud of our hardware products. We don’t compromise on the design, and have won multiple design awards over the years! Our team controls everything from designing our enclosures to choosing every component of the electronics to deliver best-in-class hardware, with firmware designed to run perfectly on our devices (Apple approach). This allows us to offer the best experience to our customers and we are focusing a lot on it. Our offices are full of hardware, on every door/wall/desk and we are iterating very fast inside the team. With a team of doers, with hands on the hardware, you can feel and see directly the impact of your work.

Stack:

• Languages: The team primarily use C and Squirrel, but we also use languages like C++, Node.js, and Golang
• Software Tools: In addition to standard developer tools such as VSC and Git, we also utilize 3D-modeling software (Fusion 360), 3D slicing software (Superslicer, Cura), and PCB tools (KiCad)
• Hardware Tools: For hardware debugging and testing, we use J-Link debugger, logic analyzer, oscilloscope, and soldering station
• Cloud Services: Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and another IoT Cloud
• On GCP, we utilize Memorystore, Cloud Functions, Logging and Monitoring
• CLI Tools: Our IoT provider offers CLI tools, and we have also built our own custom CLI tool to improve efficiency in processes such as code building, deployment, release management, testing, and debugging

Mobile Team

We deal with all things mobile: our mobile client apps (which can be found in Apple Store and Google Play), our internal operations app, our mobile tap-to-access SDKs (check out Kisi’s Tap to Unlock SDK repo), and our Apple Watch app. If something is not working as expected in the land of Android and Apple, or if someone has suggestions on how we can improve things on these platforms, we're the ones to take action!

Stack:

• Kotlin (Android)
• Swift (iOS)
• A few other libraries, but we’re keeping our apps quite clean (<30MB bundle size!)

QA Team

We raise the product quality through various testing techniques, aiming to make the product use smoother by taking into consideration the users’ experiences. Our work focuses on ensuring consistency and quality throughout the product. We work closely with the other teams testing product increments and release candidates. We are the first line of defense! While our colleagues in the other teams will cover as many scenarios as possible with automated tests, we believe that real quality assurance requires human thinking and reasoning about our product, which is why the QA team maintains a list of manually executed tests.

• Smoke testing
• Functional testing
• Regression testing

Get to know us better

Do you want to learn more about the Kisi Product team? You can get to know us better by checking out the following resources:

• the Employee Spotlight of our Backend Developer André and IoT Developer Gustaf
• our Careers page

Ready to join Kisi?

We are always looking for talented engineers! You are very welcome to reach out to our team or take a look at our open roles.