The IT Department
TheSoul Publishing is a company that uses advanced technology to produce media content. All of our creative teams work with tools and systems that were developed by our IT Department.
It’s with their help that we’re able to effectively organize the creation of our high-quality and interesting videos, animations, and articles. You can read more about the systems we develop below.
Our IT Department is a well-organized team of highly-qualified
specialists. Within the team, every individual can find their voice
and has the right to be heard.
We have no top-down culture here; we don’t enforce
a single approach to solving issues. In fact, we always
examine and analyze several different ways to solve problems,
and we’re ready to listen to suggestions.
Our activities revolve exclusively around in-house development, so we never sacrifice the quality and stability of our products for the sake of deadlines, and you can be proud of the work we do.
For instance, we have a highly competent architect whom the team members can always turn to for help with software design issues.
We have a strong QA team that adheres very firmly to all the relevant QA rules and best practices, implementing automated and manual testing. Our QA manager has a good development skill set, and personally supervises and inspects our code.
For researching new methods and approaches to development, we have our R&D section. This is made up of our Platform and Integrations Development team first and foremost, but research work is also carried out by our product teams. Our UX work is developing rapidly, and we already have a team of specialists working on interface optimization and refinement. In keeping with world trends, we’re moving towards development in Docker; we use Kubernetes and Skaffold, and we have a remote testbed which allows us to conduct development directly within a cluster.
Thanks to our effective approach to management, work organization, and relationship building, we’ve created a healthy workplace ecosystem where each individual can find their place and achieve personal development. We’re always glad to welcome new people into our ranks who have the experience and knowledge that will help us to develop further, and raise the value of our products for the good of the business.
Technologies
The main programming language that we use for our services is PHP 7.4. All of our new services are developed using Laminas and Mezzio. Our second main language is Go.
Our team develops mobile applications using native Swift, Java and Kotlin.
We use MySQL, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse, and Redis as databases. For queues, we use RabbitMQ.
Our front-end developers use React, TypeScript, and ES6.
Our infrastructure is developed on the basis of Kubernetes, Helm, and Skaffold.
We use GitLab and Asana for managing development.
In our IT Department, areas of responsibility are clearly divided between our teams. At the same time, we’re not isolated from one another and we all actively collaborate. All of our teams work according to a single style, guided by common principles and common sense.
Distribution of Functions
Our principle task is automating the company’s business processes, and the main tool we use for this is our in-house media content management system. The entire 2900-person team at TheSoul Publishing makes use of this system in one way or another. It allows us to work on any kind of content – articles, videos, graphics or animation. We are able to employ fully automated stages of production and video processing on the basis of our distributed services. The complexity of our content production processes is a constant challenge, and requires rapid and optimal solutions for interesting technical tasks.
These solutions include:
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A tool for compiling videos out of lots of individual parts. It can carry out merging and cropping functions, and insert captions. All of this is done on a fully automated basis, without the involvement of the editor
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Deep integration of project formats for various video editing systems, with the ability to access their structure and resources
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Interaction with the APIs of third-party services in order to verify content
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A block-based article editor that generates a desktop or mobile layout as output
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Image processing and real-time video transcoding services. We usually develop these services with Go
Our large-scale domain model provides us with opportunities to advance our design, architecture-related and refactoring skills. The most important technical task of our system is the transition from monolithic to microservices architecture. We realize why it’s important for us to do this and the advantages we will receive from it.
Business Solutions
We are developing tools for automating interaction with social media. In particular, we collect and maintain up-to-date data from a number of social networks. To do this, we are integrating with both official APIs provided by the networks and other sources of this kind of data. We process the resulting data and present it in a user-friendly format.
We have developed and continue to develop an automated planning and publication mechanism for media content, created in-house by our company, which works on various platforms and social media networks. The content can also be subjected to an A/B testing process before final publication.
We use various instruments and tools like: PHP 7.x., Zend Framework/Laminas Project (Apigility, Mezzio), OpenAPI, Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, MySQL, Phpunit, Infection, Psalm, and others. Our analytics systems are also transitioning to microservices architecture.
Social Analytics
Our team maintains internal services and helps with the development of PaaS and infrastructure. We develop SoA, maintain critically important services and services with large workloads, and participate in the full product production cycle up to delivery.
Among other tasks, we develop and maintain an SSO service on the basis of Keycloak, which is closely integrated with a majority of the software solutions used within the company.
We love complex tasks and testing, and we’re ready to experiment and implement new technologies. We work actively with k8s, understand well the internal functioning of applications, technologies and protocols, carry out migrations of any complexity, and are actively working to improve our SoA.
We use Go and PHP as our main languages, but we don’t shy away from using other languages that that we need to resolve our tasks.
Platform and Integrations Development
TheSoul Publishing’s portfolio includes a large number of high-traffic entertainment websites, and the content of our sites is also accessible through our mobile applications. We are actively developing these products, applying A/B testing when introducing new functionality, improving our set of analytical tools and paying close attention to our performance. All of our websites are built on a single shared codebase, and the same is true of our mobile applications. All of our solutions utilize a single API as a content provider.
The team’s immediate goals are to develop new products in new languages and markets, and to build a common platform for all of our products that will allow us to optimize the process of launching new sites and applications. Our team is cross-functional – we have both web developers (including both backend and frontend employees; these are independent applications) and mobile platform developers.
For frontend development, we use: React, Redux, and Node.js (server-side rendering), and for backend development: PHP 7.x, Zend Framework 3, MySQL, Redis, and ElasticSearch. All of this is within Kubernetes. Our Android application is written in Kotlin and implemented through MVVM architecture. We deliver content through CloudFront with the application of lambda functions, and we also apply isomorphic rendering – that is, we can render both frontend and backend content. In addition, we are actively moving towards Canary release; fortunately, we have the necessary infrastructure for this.
Websites & Apps
TheSoul Publishing’s financial systems allow us to carry out automated payments to company employees while taking into account numerous indicators. When calculating payment, we take into account not only the volume of work performed, but also how successfully the content created by the employee actually performs. We analyze various indicators from third-party platforms, and on this basis automatically calculate and award bonuses to company employees. Our financial systems are closely integrated with our accounting and payment systems.
We develop with PHP using the Laminas framework, while we save data in MySQL. We always cover our code with integration and unit testing.
We are constantly improving our service, making it more user-friendly and adding support for new payment systems so that our employees around the world can quickly and easily receive their wages.
Financial Systems
At TheSoul Publishing, we understand the importance of testing, and devote considerable resources to achieving success in this area. Thanks to their close collaboration, our QA specialists know that code does not stand still, and understand the difficulties faced by our developers.
We have built a system for automated testing, and at the same time we continue to employ manual testing. Our specialists use a systematic approach to testing and grasp the real potential for solving cases. Performing QA functions does not mean routine testing according to ready-made models for 40 hours a week; it involves initiating and applying professional approaches and methods of quality assurance, depending on the tasks before us.
Our team fully understands the importance of its overall role in software delivery – the whole process from ‘A’ to ‘Z’. We recognize the need to become faster, while at the same time we value individuals above all and have no illusions about complete automation.
QA
DevOps means a culture of product creation and the maintenance of information systems that is based on the interaction and integration of software development and infrastructure utilization.
We provide a platform for launching services and tools that make carrying out product tasks easier and faster for our teams, without a division into development and utilization.
Our platform was built using Kubernetes, and we provide instrumentation that simplifies work tasks for both local development and for QA/Test and production environments.
DevOps
Finding the balance between user interests and those of the business is a real professional challenge. This is why the specialists in our team possess both advanced professional skills and critical thinking.
Within TheSoul Publishing team, UI/UX functions for all internal and external company products. Within each product, we work on collecting data and searching for the right interface solutions. Our websites and mobile apps – which experience considerable volumes of traffic – provide large amounts of diverse metrics, and represent a huge field for research and developing hypotheses. In each specific case, we rely on the data about our audience, their behavior, needs, and ‘problems’, and we find solutions.
UI/UX
Business solutions should be based on full and high-quality data presented in a convenient format. How do we obtain this kind of data in such a dynamic and multi-faceted company like TheSoul Publishing? This is where the Business Intelligence team comes to our aid. It carries out the collection, processing, storage and consolidation of data from a huge number of diverse sources, including: internal data bases and systems, social networks, external analytical systems, and many other sources.
The huge amounts of data that we deal with force us to search for unconventional approaches to obtaining and processing them. The main task of the Business Intelligence team within the company is to help with making decisions, so we communicate directly with representatives of the business and provide them with the required data, reports and dashboards.
Business Intelligence
TheSoul Publishing is a company that heavily relies on the benefits of remote work, but at the same time we have several production studios and offices in different parts of the world so ensuring uninterrupted performance of all related IT systems and equipment is quite a challenge.
The System Administration team is responsible for providing technical support to our studio and office staff, designing expansions, supporting and upgrading local IT infrastructure, as well as improving internal and external systems and processes in collaboration with other teams. Additionally, our team supports infrastructure services that facilitate content production.
Our team members are highly-skilled professionals with extensive knowledge of network technologies and operating systems who can make sure that everything runs smoothly and all possible issues are resolved in a timely manner.
System Administration
IT Support is responsible for a wide range of activities. To begin with, we act as a first point of contact for users and help them with various issues and requests related to internally developed and external systems. Furthermore, IT Support plays a key role in feature implementation: once the development and testing are completed, we set up the systems and prepare user documentation. Besides, IT Support leads on-boarding of new content production projects, making sure that both IT and organizational tasks are delivered on time and production teams are fully equipped in all aspects. We also constantly monitor our own performance and make an effort to improve our processes.
IT Support engineers combine a high level of technical expertise with excellent communication skills to ensure fast resolution of issues and outstanding user experience.
IT Support
How can you become part of our team?
If you are interested in our vacancies, simply fill in the form beneath the job description and provide your résumé. Our recruiter will carefully study the information provided and contact you if your experience and qualifications meet our requirements.
The communication process for vacancies in the IT Team includes:
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Meeting our recruiter, Tech Leads, and the Chief Technology Officer.
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A genuinely interesting test task (our candidates really like our tasks).
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Various interview stages using modern and convenient virtual tools.
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You’ll learn all about our IT Team, our projects, future prospects, the relocation process and remote cooperation – we consider it important to answer all of your questions.
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Guaranteed, timely feedback and updates from the recruiter.
You’ll find it interesting to work for us if:
you’re an experienced specialist who possesses high-quality technical expertise, or you aim to become such a specialist
you understand the value of testing and want to develop your skills in this area
you can think critically and know how to formulate and argue your case, but are also able to listen to others’ opinions
you’re not afraid of responsibility, and you know how to and strive to convert the demands of business into IT tasks
and finally, you want to be part of a cool and creative dispersed team, and create a unique product that millions of people around the world use every day
you know how to and wish to develop microservices architecture and work with high workloads, and are not afraid of coming up against difficulties
you’re responsible, well-organized, and know how to finish what you started
your goals include self-development and gaining skills with new technology
you consider it important to establish effective team interaction processes
Where our team works
We offer our new colleagues a choice of two locations to carry out their work.
LIMASSOL
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you love sun and warmth weather, since we get 330 days of sun a year here;
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you’re a fan of outdoor leisure. There’s the sea and the mountains, the beaches and hiking tracks, mountain skiing and horse-riding;
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you sometimes forget to lock your car door. It’s a very safe place;
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you don’t want to spend too much time on commuting. It’s a small island, and you can get from your home to the office in 15 minutes on average.
CYPRUS
A great choice if:
HOME OFFICE
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this is available to you if you would like to try out this work setup;
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perhaps you already work from home and have experienced all its advantages;
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it requires a full working day, but done from home. Each of our remote-working specialists is part of a larger team;
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there’s no need to spend time commuting, so you can devote more time to your family;
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you can travel to a different country for the summer or winter and carry out your work wherever you go.
An interesting alternative to the classic work environment:
Our team
True Senior
33
The average age of an employee in the IT Department is
How many of us are there now?
95+
How we work
You can work remotely or in the studio in Riga, Limassol, or Budapest.
Anyway you'll have an opportunity to visit our offices in different locations to exchange experience with colleagues
You will be a part of, perhaps, the most unusual and cool media team. What we're doing now is unique in the global publishing industry
We believe in lifelong development, so we support our teammates in improving their professional level, choosing and taking courses of interest in the company's Learning Management System
Filming is always being carried out. But! The main principle of our work is to maintain peace and quiet.
We never disturb each other, because we know that everyone is busy with their job.
In the offices, our chefs can both develop individual menus and also cook international cuisine – each week it’s something different. We also have our own vending machines if you’d like a snack.