Tech
Feb 17, 2025
A conversation with Niilo Säämänen, CTO at Wolt
How do you scale an engineering organization from single digits to over 700 people? And what does nine years in a rapidly growing global technology scaleup teach you – beyond a healthy appreciation of adrenaline? We tackled these questions with Chief Technology Officer Niilo Säämänen, who joined Wolt as employee number six in our tech team but now leads our global engineering organization. Let’s dive into his Wolt story and experiences.
How it started vs. how it’s going: What’s your Wolt story?
I joined Wolt nine years ago for one of the reasons why I’m still here today: the ambition of the company and the laser focus we have on building the best possible customer experience. During the interview process, it was evident from the very beginning that the customer has always been at the heart of everything we do and build. When I joined we had six people in the tech team - three tech co-founders, one designer co-founder, myself, and another engineer. We were all working in one room, running out of air every half an hour! I joined as a developer to build the first web version of Wolt. As we grew, I started leading our engineering team and after quite a crazy ride I now lead our global engineering organization of 700+ people.
Today, I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Wolt. My job is all about getting the right people to do the right things. I help to ensure alignment between the tech organization and the business so that the voice of our engineering team is heard in the right places when we’re building our business and planning our strategy. Often, I refer to myself as the ultimate handwaiver!
What lessons have you distilled from nine hectic years at Wolt?
When you’re working in a scaleup, and growing together with it, you never really know what the future holds. Managing uncertainty has been the biggest challenge and learning for me personally. You always have too little information about what “good” looks like, and have to make decisions quickly. You often have to re-adjust how you think and approach topics every half a year as the company evolves. Nothing can be taken for granted. That has been a big learning experience for me, and what I also appreciate about scaleups.
Also, operating in a highly competitive industry at the scale that we do, you need to learn to take in the creative chaos that it brings. Things change, and that’s ok. In fact, change is often a great thing. This brings me to another lesson: never fall in love with your ideas. What worked four years ago and was the right solution then, most likely won’t work at all at this scale. With our size and speed, you have to understand and focus on what’s truly important. There’s no way to control everything: prioritize the problems, solve them, and move on to the next ones.
It can’t be all rainbows and unicorns – what are the biggest challenges of working at Wolt?
I think the biggest challenges are linked to what makes Wolt great. We’re very focused on entrepreneurship and ownership. When you’re hired we set the bar high, so we expect you to hit the ground running. It takes a certain level of autonomy and ability to drive things independently, especially if you come from a larger organization that has lots of ready-made boxes to tick. Wolt has no boxes - you only have a direction towards which you should go, sometimes without clear guidelines. You get to truly own your priorities and figure out the best ways to solve the problems you’re tackling. That’s also what makes it so rewarding. And our people are always there to help each other out, you just have to reach out and ask.
What’s at the core of your engineering organization?
From the very beginning, we’ve had a lot of ambition in not just what we build, but how we build things. We put emphasis on craft quality, ensuring we build things that we can truly be proud of. For engineers, this means things like great open source projects and ensuring that our engineers have a real impact on the problems they’re solving. We aim to give space for our engineers to be creative, even when we must remain laser-focused on serving our customers. I think it’s all about finding a balance, but when you take some extra time and care to build a solution, sometimes you can leverage it to a larger scale.
Something our product teams are great at is adapting and pivoting to new things quickly. We have the ability to quickly build new business lines from scratch due to the way we’ve built up our tech and business. We’ve spent a lot of time building solid foundations, and now we can see the impact of that. We have so many exciting new verticals, new customer experiences, new problems we’re planning to solve, and solutions we’re going to build that can sit on top of our current tech. It’s so freaking cool that we’re finally in this place where we can start building new, innovative things so quickly. Say, for example building fintech solutions like Wolt Capital, POS (point of sales) integrations for merchants, or polishing up the user experience by launching the gamified experience Wolt Rewards. And lots of more exciting things to come!
You mentioned craft excellence, and we talk a lot about building “Wolt-grade” products. What does this mean?
For me, craft excellence means building tech and products that you can be proud of, products that are so good you want to tell others “I freaking built this!” and explain how you did it. Wolt-grade is our definition of excellence that we strive for in everything we create. In all our Wolt products, you see this ambition as the delightful user experience. It comes from going above and beyond what the user is expecting. It’s not enough for something to “just” work – you want to create that feeling for the user that makes them go “Wow, someone has really thought this through!”.
But craft excellence isn’t something only for the end customer. For our engineers, it’s about building great quality code so that when the next engineer touches your work, it makes sense and is easy to understand. A mantra we have is to always leave code better than you found it. At this scale all our sins come to fruition very quickly if we don’t build things well, so we must keep up the quality of our work.
What challenges set Wolt apart from the crowd?
Overall I’d say the scale at which we do things is very rare, and exciting. We now have over 45 million Wolt customers, partner with 260,000+ courier partners, and have 170,000+ venues using our products. So whichever part of our products you work on, you have an impact on a massive user base. As we operate in 28 countries across the globe, you have to build the best possible solutions that fit these different locales – all in one platform. Everything we build also needs to ship in 28 local languages. So let’s say there are lots of interesting problems to solve!
To give some more engineering-specific examples, on the frontend side, Wolt Rewards is a great example of something we’ve built in-house from scratch to bring more joy to our customers. It’s gamification of the user experience, polished to a T, and it touches almost all parts of the Wolt App’s life cycle, which is really cool.
On the backend side the scale today is very big. We build with a wide set of modern technologies, pairing Kotlin and Python with Kafka and gRPC, running on multiple clusters on Kops in AWS. Building a strong architecture backbone is a must so that we can build tech very quickly but also handle the complexity regarding reliability, service-to-service communication, and database scaling. Solid technical solutions help us ensure we don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.
How would you describe our engineering culture?
We do things together. What I often come across from things like newbie surveys is that our people are genuinely surprised by how willing colleagues are to help each other out. If you have a problem, people will always be there for you. With the end-to-end ownership that our people have over their services, they want feedback and the chance to discuss and learn new ideas on how things could be done even better. We do a lot of debating, in a positive way.
We also trust our people a lot. We have peer reviews, but everyone can ship into production. Often in large companies, you encounter lots of processes and the need for your code to go through various checks, which slows down the process of shipping things. We try to keep this to a minimum so we can make changes very quickly. It’s all about ownership and accountability, maturity, great failovers, and backups for when shit goes down. We work on automating the recovery, and minimizing the blast radius, rather than stopping people from shipping things quickly. It isn’t the easiest thing to pull off at scale, but truly makes for happy and productive engineers.
How does an engineer succeed at Wolt?
You need to have genuine passion and care for what you do. We’re big on craft, so we’re looking for people dedicated to solving problems and building products that just feel right. People who come in and leave things in a better place than they were before.
Some of our best engineers have joined as interns or juniors and grown really quickly by having a lot of curiosity and the right attitude. At Wolt, you’ll get support and work with some of the most brilliant people around, but you have to drive your growth yourself.
What will keep you at Wolt for the next nine years?
I’m really proud of how our engineering team rebuilt our foundations after the pandemic, and now we can build new services and platforms on top of it quickly. We’ve started to introduce new things like multi-venue ordering, subscription services, logistics as a platform, and much more. Technically, this opens up many new, exciting opportunities for what we can build and how quickly we can ship new big things.
Now as part of DoorDash, it’s very exciting to think about the scale of our operations. Together we’re in over 30 countries and we operate at 10x scale compared to what we did before the merger. We’re building a global platform together. Our teams are collaborating on many projects, and trying to find the best of both companies to serve us at this scale. The impact you can have and the technical complexities you face are fascinating, and that’s what keeps me excited about our work every day.
