Pros
I worked at Opia for nearly 6 years as part of their Product development team, building their core platform. Here's what I would highlight from my time there:
As a software engineer:
- A culture of innovation - I was always working on something new and interesting
- A culture of technical excellence, which was driven from the top. The focus on industry best practices and the extensive test suite helped me sleep at night
- Lack of technical debt - because of the strict technical standards. Even the older codebases are consistent. Once you understand the architecture, you can hop into any codebase and easily get to work
- An interesting and very visible product, that you've probably used yourself! Throughout my time it was great to see what I'm building be used by real people
- Working with some of the biggest tech clients in the world was quite exciting
As an employee:
- Fully WFH policy
- Opia has frequent social events in Newcastle, which are usually fully paid for and were a great opportunity to meet up with colleagues
- In my experience, Opia offers a great many progression opportunities
- The benefits are great, including a personal development days and a learning fund (which I took full advantage of!)
I'd say Opia's product development team is a great place to work for any developer looking to grow their skills and work with interesting products
Cons
- Workload is often quite high for all departments
- Opia's grown a lot in the last 5 years, which naturally means more red tape - although really good efforts were being made to manage that by the time I left