Senior Java Developer (SwiftLOG)

About Kuehne + Nagel

Over our 125 year history, Kuehne + Nagel has evolved from a traditional international freight forwarder to a leading global provider of innovative and fully integrated supply chain solutions.

The global logistics network is our strongest asset. Dedication, integration and innovation are at the heart of our business philosophy. Focused on our customers’ needs we provide integrated logistics solutions of outstanding quality and operational excellence – we are the extension of your business.

Position

Project goal

We are building a new warehouse management system called SwiftLOG. The next generation WMS platform will allow KN to serve its customers with an effective platform that is easy to use and train, has best in class functionality and productivity and supports Contract Logistics Focus & Excellence Strategy.

Target markets for the product include FMCG, High-Tech, Pharma & Healthcare, Industrials and E-Commerce. Legacy solution CIEL FW FD is built on RPG, and equally importantly has functionality gaps, especially in areas such as digitalization and ecommerce, usability. With the new project KN is also looking to improve time to market for implementations & innovation.

Current product covers 58% of eligible turn-over – ie functionality gaps create the need for niche solutions. Business goal is to bridge the gaps while leveraging strengths of current global scale solution (270 sites, 1300 customers, 300 go-lives p.a., 250 WMS experts).

At the heart of solution we use commercial software JDA WMS which we will extend and integrate to our application landscape by using microservices. Thus central to development is the integration layer we call STIG which is designed to decouple the WMS from the rest of the K+N application landscape so that we can maintain stable interfaces between the WMS and landscape. It will also provide super user/implementer configuration user interfaces to control the flow/transformation/enrichment of messages between the WMS and landscape.

Project setup

SwiftLOG is a rather greenfield and distributed agile project. We are now 2 development teams (1 external contractor team in Tallinn and 1 in Nottingham, UK). The teams are supported by technical architecture consultants and Product Owner. Development teams are not yet specialized but its expected that each will have own functional and technical topics.

The teams work in a Scrum fashion. Each of the synchronized 2-week iterations is followed by a common demonstration session and a planning of future work. Weekly estimation and refinement sessions help us to shape up the backlog. We continuously improve our processes. We put growing effort into test automation to support our release cycle. Besides the unit, service and integration tests that are implemented by developers.

The development of the product has been going on for half a year now. But there are still open questions facing teams, eg choreography vs orchestration of services, building scalable platform to while facilitating keep current strategy, scaling teams and processes.

Senior Developer is expected to join Lead Developer to together establish first internal team in Tallinn that will grow 6 person strong by end of 2018.

Our technology

Our key technology components are:

• Java 8
• Oracle 12C
• JPA2
• Spring Integrator
• Angular 4
• Gradle for builds
• Jenkins for Continuous Integration, releases and other automation
• jUNit and Mockito for testing
• Orchestration and choreography of services

Your challenges

In a big distributed project like SwiftLOG, efficient communication is the key to success. You will have to mobilize all of your great communication skills while working with us. Our primary working language is English and you will learn a lot of different accents of it. Even though we aim to have development teams as independent as possible, there are still a lot of things the teams have to align on between each other. We share architectural principles, coding and design guidelines, processes and even the codebase. This means that there is a lot of communication going on to make it all work. And you have to like to talk about your ways of working, to share knowledge and to negotiate with various parties.

Also from the technical point of view there are challenges to every taste. It’s really not only about form processing. For example, we are heavily integrated with all sorts of other systems within the Kühne+Nagel ecosystem. So, there are various challenges related to concurrent message and data processing. The more countries we will go live in, the more performance issues we will have to face.

Having said all the above, here’s what we want you to do:

• Develop a Java-based Warehouse Management System
• Design and implement automated test-cases for your code
• Write Clean Code and refactor!
• Take responsibility for quality and long-term maintainability of the developed software
• Work collaboratively on definition, specification and design of a modular and integrated software product
• Build solid knowledge in warehouse management business domain
• Deliver functional and technical documentation when appropriate
• System maintenance, support of application rollouts and operations

Your qualification

• 4+ years of active software development experience
• Academic degree of computer sciences or equivalent knowledge
• You have taken part in large-scale projects before and you know what can go wrong
• You feel physically bad about writing "smelly" code. Single-character variable names and 100-line methods make you cry
• You can tell when the Factory pattern makes sense and more importantly, when it doesn't
• You love to create beautiful design, but you don't forget the K.I.S.S. principle
• You love to refactor code, but not so much that you can't remember anymore what you wanted to implement in the first place
• You are alerted when you have just removed a line of code and all the tests still pass
• You know Java ecosystem by heart and you know your tools. You don't invent your own caching mechanism just because you can
• It would be nice if you also understand the mechanics behind the agile methodologies and trust in self-organization
• We would be absolutely excited if you like to pair program
• You feel proud but also responsible for the things you create
• You are fluent in English

What we offer

• Open and friendly working environment in Ülemiste City, Tallinn. Free parking in the area included
• Experience in working on an international project with lots of new and interesting people
• You get to practice your German language skills (if you have some and if you would like to)
• Possibility to develop (both, technical- or people-skill development paths)
• Competitive salary
• Sport/Health Care Benefit
• Phone compensation & phone bill compensation
• Sick leave allowance (100% paid sick leave starting from the second day)
• 1 week of additional 'Winter vacation' after 3 years of working in K+N
• Monetary gifts for Birthdays
• Referral bonus for bringing your friends in
• School start celebration for parents
• Language courses
• Military reserve/refresher training compensation
• Epic Summer- , Winter- and Team events

Additional details

Communication and all issues related to the position are curated by the recruitment partner of Kuehne + Nagel.