Background
Klarna is a global buy-now, pay-later service designed primarily for online purchases. They’re Europe’s biggest FinTech that at one point boasted a $46 billion evaluation. Klarna created a major engineering hub in Berlin. As a company that likes to co-locate teams, they needed to quickly scale their on-site operations for all the teams that operated out of Berlin. Klarna is deeply committed to creating services utilizing full-stack javascript/typescript, which is the tech that Makers’ Den has centered around, and made us a natural choice to scale some of their teams.
Stefan de Lange
Head of Global Enterprise Custom Solutions at Klarna
“Makers’ Den enabled us to hit the ground running conducting special projects with our enterprise clients. We are building bespoke frontends and APIs with Typescript / ReactJS / NodeJS which connect with Klarna’s existing services to deliver cutting-edge payment journeys. Their engineers provided excellent on-site technical expertise, communication, and a culture of transparency and consistent delivery for a full year”
How we worked together
We’ve worked together in multiple contexts, but we’ll limit ourselves here to the one we have a public reference for, which was founding their custom solution teams. A full-stack team that can move on a dime and quickly creates custom Klarna-based solutions for big clients that don’t have the same agility.
In this case, we amended their team, but as the first engineers in it. We adapted to Klarna’s processes fully and mainly provided raw engineering talent. Our commitment in this case was for a year, after which their team was fully staffed with full-time employees.
The Tech
Typescript - Makers’ Den and Klarna implement most of their new services with Typescript.
ReactJS - Makers’ Den and Klarna are fully committed to ReactJS as their front-end technologies.
NodeJS/Express - For most new services, Klarna preferred NodeJS-based backends, which is our preference as well.
Klarna Payments - All the custom solutions involved some manner of payment integration, and it was naturally always payment via Klarna.
The Results
Klarna themselves employ world-class engineers, and working side by side with them was a natural fit. We enjoyed very much working with Klarna and the scale of the problems they dealt with being a global payment provider, and the tough deadlines and requirements set by some of the big brand names that they in part were servicing via the custom solutions team.
