A day in the life of Full-Stack Software Engineer Pawel Kunicki at MoonPay
What's it like to work at MoonPay? Here's a look into Full-Stack Software Engineer Pawel Kunicki's experience.
By Pawel Kunicki
Introduction: A bit about me
Hi everyone 👋,
I'm Pawel from Poland and I've been a software engineer for over the last 8 years, mostly in the fintech and the lab automation industries. I joined MoonPay early in 2021 during a super growth cycle of the company and the crypto market boom.
In the past, I’ve worked with large enterprise and startup companies, including my own. I've always worn many hats, such as being a full-stack developer, team leader or project manager. I also graduated in Computer Science and Management. Over the years, I’ve worked with multiple organisations, software architectures and leaders, and I can honestly say that MoonPay has been a very positive surprise!
In addition to work, I'm a proactive person, I love hiking, learning about the economy, books and traveling.
What does your typical day at MoonPay look like?
A 'typical' day at MoonPay ;-)
We work remotely, but all tech teams are mostly located around Europe, so we have a lot of overlap during the day.
I usually wake up around 7-8 AM, then play some sports, meditate, and read a book or listen to a podcast. Next, I grab some breakfast, and I head to my desk with a cup of tea or coffee. I start my work with a catch-up on team messages and code reviews, which takes around 45 min, so I still have time for some coding or architecture design before a stand-up.
After a while, I switch my electric desk to a standing mode, and we have a team stand-up (literally) where we have a brief talk about the day before and plans for today. Whenever we have some issue or longer discussion, we tend to do a follow-up call to sort out any issues or blockers.
During the day, we try to focus on a particular task, so that we can ship some product features or improvements in a 2-weekly sprint. We work in cross-functional teams, so we always clarify product requirements with product managers and stakeholders. We make sure that our work is addressing real problems.
Sometimes, throughout the day we have a break for an interview with a candidate or help teammates to solve other problems. Helpfulness is a real thing here, after-all, we all have the same goal!
Everyone wraps up the day at a different hour, but generally don't set up any meetings after 4-5 PM, so everyone can have a proper time off. Sometimes, we do something fun with the team and play some games. These events might happen a bit later in the evening, but we care about social activities and having fun!
What do you love about being a Software Engineer at MoonPay?
Software engineering as a career is attractive to me in a many ways, but ultimately I love resolving complex problems and having an impact on global challenges. At the same time, I also enjoy spending time with smart people and always strive to learn as much as I can.
Nowadays, software engineers don’t only spend time coding, but we also play a key role in product development and co-op with business stakeholders. This holistic approach resonates with me very much.
What do you love about working at MoonPay?
MoonPay has a lot of advantages, but the key cultural element is constant development and learning on the go. We’re always looking for internal improvements and we're always trying to improve the experience for our customers. On top of that, the company is data-driven, which means that all decisions we make are backed up by data.
On the human side, we care about self-care, social activities and time off. Despite the fact we’re remote, we have a lot of team building activities and we’re planning team offsites.
Nowadays, many companies are remote, but it’s a different experience if a company is remote-first vs office-based. We value responsibility, autonomy and trust.
How and why did you end up joining MoonPay?
After 4 years in my previous company as a software engineer and team leader, I decided to sail out to new oceans. It was at the end of 2020, still during a global pandemic, travel restrictions and a lot of uncertainty. So, I had a few criteria for me:
Remote work possibility
Fast product development
Young company with fresh mindsets and architecture
Full responsibility with challenges and opportunities
Great people
A company with a high appetite for growth and stock options
After many interviews with different companies, I received a few offers, and MoonPay was a winner in all aspects above! Every stage of the interview was very appealing, and I noticed that the CTO and CEO put a lot of effort in, and they believe in the mission of bringing 1 billion people to crypto, so I decided to join the team.
What’s an exciting challenge you're facing in your role over the next 6-12 months?
On the product level, I believe in the next few months, we will bring more payment solutions and optimize the crypto purchase process so we can offer the most cost-effective and safest way to buy cryptocurrencies for our customers.
We’re also focused on creating features helping make it easier to access the world of crypto. I think the financial market has a lot of challenges ahead, and we’re here to disrupt the old banking system so that our society worldwide has fair access to a distributed system.
On an organisation level, we move very quickly and and at the same time, try to keep a high level of quality.  We're currently scaling our tech team, but we still want to preserve existing autonomy, pace and responsibility. We don’t want to end up with knowledge silos and long release procedures. Our cross-functional team setup is fully scalable, but we know there is always room for improvement so that we can always feel productive and have clear outcomes.
The technical side of what we're building also looks very promising. We’re expanding our infrastructure with a distributed microservice architecture mindset. It’s a challenge to keep separate contexts at a high quality, without knowledge silos, but we do our best to address that aspect as well. We're also working on monitoring, smart routing engines and prediction systems so that we’re always up to date with the latest data.
What roles are MoonPay hiring for right now and what advice would you give to people applying?
Right now, it is perhaps the best moment to join MoonPay. We’re growing super fast and we’re mature enough to work at a higher scale, but still have a startup culture.
We’re looking for top talent in all engineering fields: front-end, back-end, full-stack, data or security. We’re all responsible, creative and we try to learn and improve every day! At this stage, we’re mostly focused on mid and senior engineers, but be sure to follow our careers page to stay up to date.
If you're considering MoonPay for your next role, and have questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn! I strongly believe that together we can achieve amazing things here!
And that's a day in my life.
