Best workplaces for developers for different life situations and needs
The best workplaces for developers. That’s such a challenging topic, because the workplace that’s the best for me may not be the best for you. That’s why we put the companies under different categories to make it easier for you to find employers that suit your life situation and needs.
Close-knit work community = For you who value active and tight work community and spending time with co-workers outside working hours.
Work-life balancer = For you who have small kids and/or who value work-life-balance and want flexibility for your working.
Niche = For you who want to cure cancer or build satellites, for example.
International = For you who want to be part of a multinational team. This category includes companies that warmly welcome non-Finnish speakers.
Best salary = For you who want the best salary in the industry.
Remote = For digital nomads.
Social significance = For you who want to develop the Finnish society.
Close-knit work community
UpCloud
Product house that has had very strong growth. UpCloud’s core business is to provide cloud services with an “infrastructure-as-a-service” principle. Global atmosphere, employees around the globe. Communality is a crucial part of UpCloud’s identity; they organize insane parties and also trips abroad for the whole company. It should also be mentioned that UpCloud is a great choice for digital nomads!
New Things Co
A consulting house that is all about curiosity towards the latest technologies and the world. Communality and spending time together are highly valued and the team regularly learns new things together and has sauna nights. Multinational team that values diversity and inclusion. A great option for non-Finnish speakers.
Qvik
A mobile consulting house that advocates for software industry’s diversity and equality. Qvikies adore their work community and it shows. There are numerous leisure clubs and supported sports and hobby possibilities, and it’s always a good reason to have fun with colleagues, be it Oktoberfest or “just” Friday. Qvik also offers a remote office from January to March for those who want to escape the darkness of the Finnish winter to somewhere warm and sunny. Low-hierarchy culture and flexible working hours.
Sievo
A fast-growing procurement analytics software company that has been seen more than once on the Great Place to Work -listing. Caring is one of Sievo’s core values, and when employees and customers are happy, the company is happy. Donuts, get-togethers and team lunches delight the Sievonians regularly. Sievo also offers #wintergetaway remote office abroad, and does a great job for more equal software industry.
Valamis
Valamis specializes in the digitization of learning. Working with for example NASA has made sure the company’s reputation has spread internationally too. Valamis invests in team spirit – there are team hikes, kilometer race for cyclists, a wide range of after work activities and trips abroad.
Work-life balancer
Elisa
Elisa provides telecommunications and ICT services in Finland and abroad. Ideal workplace for those with families and who want to separate work and free-time, and who want to go home on time every day. Remote work is common.
Aava Medical Centre
A growing and evolving company that reforms the healthcare and preventive occupational health care by developing modern healthcare services and digital tools for doctors, medical staff as well as clients. Excellent work-life balance and provides comprehensive health care for employees and their families.
Solita
Versatile Solita is a technology, data and design company where employees really seem to enjoy themselves. Solita’s staff leakage percent is one of the lowest in the industry, and employees are highly valued and the work environment is inspiring. The company invests in supporting the professional development of the employees and provides opportunity to influence one’s own work tasks. Good work-life balance, and both management and company culture understand the challenges of family life and support employees in those challenges.
Siili
Siili is a change partner that transforms visions into digital strategies, data into insights and ideas into innovations and services. A family-friendly workplace where the management supports and encourages both fathers and mothers to have parental- and nursing leaves. Professional childcare is also provided for employees with families for example if a child falls ill. Remote work and flexible work hours are a no-brainer, and employees have the freedom to work regardless of place and time.
Gofore
A consulting house that has grown rapidly while still maintaining a low hierarchy and open internal communication. Gofore’s culture is built on equality, transparency and trust, and employees can decide how their work should be done. Remote work is common and so are flexible working hours.
Gofore has been pioneering ethical digital work in the public sector in Finland for some time, and is one of the toughest players in that field. Many may perceive public sector dull, but often one gets to solve really interesting and meaningful social problems and to build products and services for huge amount of users. A big high five for Gofore for being able to provide growth opportunities for slightly younger developers, and for the company’s commitment to reduce its environmental footprint.
Niche
ICEYE
ICEYE manufactures satellites and provides timely and reliable radar satellite imagery for its customers. With the help of a near real-time radar imagery, for example authorities can compare ships that are sailing in territorial waters with the transponder data the ships send and thus detect ships whose transmitters are turned off and which are likely up to some mischief. ICEYE’s competitive advantage is the high level of workmanship and engineering skills that enable the development of satellites with a fraction of competitors’ prices, yet using existing and well-known technologies.
As the number of satellites in the orbit increases, so does the amount of processed data. In order to get the data reliably and quickly available for the customer, a high-quality and automated infrastructure is needed in the background. To solve the problems related to the creation and maintenance of this infrastructure and data processing, ICEYE needs the help of an experienced team.
Starship
Starship is revolutionizing food and package deliveries with a network of autonomous robots. The company was founded in 2014 and today the robots have delivered more than 650,000 orders, driven more than 1.2 million kilometers independently and crossed more than 9 million crossings.
Autonomous robots roaming the streets is a great challenge and brings along some unique engineering challenges both on the physical side of the robots as well as at the backend. Starship’s business lies on three growth pillars; consumers, merchants and operations, all enabled by the world’s leading autonomous driving and fleet orchestration systems that elegantly direct the award-winning robots. Starship mobile application plays a big role on the consumer side; customers use the app to order food, track the robot’s journey and open a locked cargo, among other things. Merchants pillar focuses on how orders reach the stores and restaurants and end up all the way to the customer. Routing the robots to customers over the most optimal paths, offline fault predictions and much more is related to the operations side.
Aiven
Aiven is on its way of becoming the world’s leading open-source DBaaS vendor. They build a database infrastructure as a service solution for global market so that their customers, i.e. other developers. One special note is that the founders are also developers, so the company really has a strong tech know-how and is very proud of that. The multi-national team is super experienced as a big part of the employees have 10-20 years of work experience.
Varian
Varian is working towards a world without the fear of cancer. About 85% of the radiotherapy equipment sold in Finland and 60% worldwide are built by Varian. The company is a little less known employer in the Finnish IT scene although its radiotherapy treatment planning systems are being developed here by about 200 people, most working on the radiotherapy software.
More and more is learned about cancer, which requires constant research and development of the treatment methods and tools. To support this, Varian needs Talents with extensive coding skills and experience from applied mathematics and physics. Varian is the place for you who want to save lives in an innovative and international company.
Supermetrics
It all started from a Google t-shirt competition, and the outcome became a million-dollar business. Supermetrics is a metrics platform that saves web analysts and marketers from CSVs and copy/paste hell by making data transferring from different platforms easy. At Supermetrics you get to handle big masses of data, definitely the place to be for data geeks! Customers like Warner Bros., Samsung and Nestlé trust the company.
International
Columbia Road
Consulting house specializing in digital sales and marketing, masters of growth hacking, e-commerce and salesforce. Columbia Road was founded in 2016 and it already employs about 100 consultants in Helsinki and Stockholm. The official working language is English and the team is multinational. CR appreciates its employees greatly and it has been a pleasure to see how CR has been taking care of its own during Covid-19 pandemic; remote pub quizzes (also suitable for employees with children!), after-works and workshops, as well as gifts.
Smartly
An inspiring company, a superb product and a great place for slightly younger developers to grow. Smartly has grown into a global company of over 300 employees in just six years, developing and cherishing its culture free from bullying and discrimination along the way. What does Smartly do exactly? Automated tools to enhance social advertising and growing business online.
Remedy
Alan Wake and Max Payne. Here’s a gaming company that just doesn’t need an introduction. The company’s games have been made into books, comics and a Hollywood movie, among other things. A multinational team, employing the world’s best game developers. The latest game Control has also gained tremendous success, and now we’re looking forward to the next hit.
Brella
The event industry is undergoing a major change, and Brella will most likely come out of this change as a winner. Brella is a virtual event platform that serves both event organizers and attendees. The platform helps attendees to find the most relevant co-participants with whom to network with and to find jobs, colleagues and investors. With the help of Brella, event organizers can host livestream events and receive relevant data on both attendees and the effectiveness of event marketing and communication. The company has a multinational team and a strong global presence, only 5% of the revenue comes from Finland.
Kone
Finnish elevator manufacturer does not need an introduction. Of course, business is not limited to just elevators. This international company offers a variety of vertical movement services and also keeps them in shape. “What can developers do at Kone” you might think. Well, stuff like remote management systems, security and embedded, to name a few. For example, when building remotely controlled elevators, the level of security must be very high so no one can hack and drop the elevator.
+ Aiven, ICEYE, Mavericks, Microsoft, NTC, Oura, Starship, Supermetrics, Upcloud, Valamis, and Varian, presented elsewhere in this listing.
Best salary
Mavericks
Consulting house for developers who do not need bouncy castles and other cool fringe benefits, but who want the best salary in the industry. 70% of invoicing goes to the consultants’ pockets. Mavericks combines the best aspects of consulting and entrepreneurship: the salary level of an independent contractor and the benefits of consulting house in accounting and project hunt. Mavericks’ growth has been insane in the Corona year and the company has tripled its headcount. Exceptionally open and conversational culture.
Rakettitiede
A consulting house whose core competencies are web and mobile services, IoT and embedded systems. A laid-back company culture that relies on the skills of the employees and offers high autonomy. Genuinely interesting projects and you get to choose which ones you want to work on. Salary and co-workers are the one of the best in the industry. 50% of the billing goes to the consultants’ wallets.
Microsoft
Microsoft has been making software since the 70s, and their processes are so on point. The Microsoft Windows operating system is one of the world’s largest software product projects. Very competitive salary, but goal-oriented US culture is quite deeply ingrained, which can cause a headache for those accustomed to the habits of the Nordic welfare state.
Bitfactor
A consulting house producing digital services and strategies. Bifa masters everything from design to software and analytics, and has big customers. Employees get lots of freedom and responsibility as well as a motivating work community and competent colleagues.
Supercell
One of the best workplaces for a developer interested in mobile games. Very impressive as a work environment, fairly small development teams that are allowed to develop their games autonomously. Enthusiastic atmosphere, “fail fast and learn fast” mentality.
Remote
UpCloud
Already introduced in this listing. Finnish product house, that has had fast and strong growth. Core business is to provide cloud services on an “infrastructure-as-a-service” basis. Remote work is a no-brainer, the place to be for digital nomads!
Tulka
A startup that wants to remove language barriers between people all over the world by providing unprecedentedly fast interpretation services through a mobile app. Tulka gave away its office in the summer of 2020, but was very remote work -friendly even before Covid-19.
Flockler
The Flockler platform helps marketers collect and display social media user-generated content (Instagram photos, Facebook posts, Tweets, YouTube videos …) on any digital service, with the goal of increasing conversions and the time spent on the site. An international and remote work -friendly company with offices in London and Tampere. Customers include Bayer 04 Leverkusen, GoPro and Milka. Making a landfall to US with NHL teams.
Oura
One of Finland’s growth rockets. A company that develops and manufactures a wellness ring that measures the user’s sleep, heart rate, body temperature and activity, among other things. Oura received tremendous media attention and hype when Oura and researchers from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) began to explore the smart ring’s potential to recognize the first symptoms of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. An innovative and remote work -friendly workplace.
Wolt
Another Finnish growth rocket that offers restaurant food payment and home delivery services in more than 20 countries. In the spring of 2020, Wolt opened an online grocery store called Wolt Market to Jätkäsaari, and another to Kalasatama in the autumn of 2020. The company has many development teams, such as logistics, fintech and merchants, that are treated with very interesting software development challenges.
Social significance
Vaana
With an aging population, the social and health services of the developed countries demand more and more resources, but at the same time the number of working taxpayers is decreasing. Vaana is fixing this sustainability gap by involving the private sector in the producing of public social and health services. If the sustainability gap will not be fixed, the Nordic welfare state will not be able to function and cannot afford similar education or other public services as before. Vaana has an extremely conversational and inclusive culture. A small company where you can have a say on how and with what technologies the development work is done.
VTT
VTT is a research, development and innovation institute that strives to create commercial demand for science. Explores global challenges and is involved in really interesting projects; VTT researches fusion reactors, public transport automation, quantum technology and biotechnological food production, to name a few. So as a developer you can do much more than just web forms!
VR
Valtion Rautatiet a.k.a. VR keeps Finland moving and does an important work for a greener transportation and moving. A company that one doesn’t really need to introduce to relatives at family occasions. VR is currently struggling with the same big changes as banks and retail, as VR didn’t have to think about the Internet in the 20th century, but today a big part of the revenue comes through digital channels. Because of this change the work that developers do can be increasingly seen in VR’s everyday life, and is therefore a more interesting work place for coders. The company has also done a great job at raising the software professionals’ awareness of VR as an IT employer.
THL
Finnish institute for health and welfare (in Finnish THL) is a research, expert and development institute whose task is to improve the well-being and health of the population. THL creates conditions for, for example, electronic information management for social welfare and health care. Has got a wide range of information systems, separate network services and database solutions that developers get to work on. Application development is mainly carried out through project-based activities and by using agile methods.
DVV
DVV focuses on securing data availability and improving the digitalization of our society and the development of good data processing and management practices. The agency is also responsible for the maintenance and development of the most important basic register of our society, the Population Information System (Väestötietojärjestelmä VTJ). DVV’s work has a big significance on society, and the agency is involved in the following projects, among others: AuroraAI, Digital Identity, Public Administration Digital Security Development Program JUDO and Digitalization Promotion Program DEO.
Read also: Developer’s Top 50 Workplaces in Finland in 2021
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