Driving innovation and collaboration: Inside emnify's Squad Summits

Our bi-annual Squad Summit events are a highlight of my year, and here’s why: they bring our product and engineering teams together for a few days of in-person collaboration, focused work, and fun. Let me share more.

Exploring bold ideas and innovative solutions

One of the things I like most about the event is watching our engineers think beyond their day-to-day work and ask, “What’s next? What should we build if there were no constrains?”

This year, we extended our internal event called Squad Summit to three days. Two of those days are dedicated to a hackathon, while one day is set up as a conference with different workshops and knowledge-sharing sessions.

Highlights from our hackathons

The hackathon has become a highlight, featuring some healthy competition and cool prizes. They’re where bold ideas are tested, and tricky problems get solved … fast. It’s incredible what we can accomplish in just a few focused days.

For example, during our spring Squad Summit, one team developed a way to deploy each PR with a unique URL allowing us to significantly simplify and further automate the release process. This capability quickly gained traction and has been adopted as a new standard for deploying changes to our portal.

At the fall Squad Summit, another team created an AI bot to interact with emnify APIs using latest frameworks like LangGraph demonstrating how our customer experience can be enhanced with AI and advanced human-in-the-loop and memory features.

Those two examples as well as many other hackathon projects create real impact for emnify and influence our future roadmaps.

Building connections across teams

Working in a distributed organization comes with unique challenges that can impact communication, collaboration, and overall organizational cohesion.

Intentional efforts are needed to overcome these challenges and the Squad Summit is an essential component of those efforts. It brings our teams together, allowing them to collaborate face-to-face, communicate more effectively and build relationships that can lead to new ideas and easier problem-solving. That’s why this event is so important to me. 

Learning from each other 

As leaders, it's our responsibility to give our teams the tools and opportunities to grow, both personally and professionally. One day of the Squad Summit is dedicated to workshops, where we encourage team members to share knowledge and learn from each other. All workshop topics are suggested and hosted by our engineers and product team members.

This year, several workshops stood out, including a deep dive into Kafka Streams on EKS, a session about adopting architecture advice process, and a hands-on workshop about Grafana Loki. 

Every time, I’m impressed by the depth of expertise of our colleagues and their willingness to share it.

More than just innovation - It’s about building our culture

These events are all about bringing people together, celebrating what we’ve accomplished, and inspiring each other to reach for the next challenge. I strongly believe that the best work happens when people feel connected and empowered, and these events play a significant part in building that environment and engineering culture here at emnify.

Reflecting on this year’s two Squad Summits, I feel incredibly proud and excited for what’s next. I would like to thank Alexander Schwartz, Eniko Laszlo, Oleksandr Snidalov for leading the event organization as well as everyone who contributed - it was a true team effort.

Be part of our team

If you are an engineer who enjoys solving complex technical challenges and you are looking for a place where you can make a real impact, then emnify is the place for you. You will get to apply cutting-edge technologies at scale to build a real-time, global platform with telco-grade reliability. Here, your ideas can thrive, and you can grow alongside a team that’s always pushing boundaries to make cellular connectivity a cloud resource