Few years ago I stumbled upon an opportunity to work for a London based startup as a QA engineer. I was supposed to work remotely with occasional business trips to London. I didn’t have to think about it twice, the offer was very attractive. I liked the company and the chance to travel abroad.

Digital Moneybox Limited runs an IOS and Android mobile app called Moneybox, which allows UK residents to easily invest their savings in a variety of financial products such as pensions and ISAs (Individual Savings Account). The company has been established in 2015 and has been achieving great success since. It has been nominated for a number of UK consumer awards and won the Best Money App 2019 (The Times Consumer Investment Awards).

I have been working remotely out of a coworking space in Brno and spent about a week in London each two or three months. The office was located in the very heart of London at South Bank, near the river Thames and about ten minutes from Blackfriers. I have never been in UK before, so I was enjoying every second of these trips and not just because I had all the expenses covered :D. I loved the food, the architecture and the vibrant atmosphere of the city center. On the other hand it was quite overwhelming, I was usually pretty worn out when I got back to my hotel.

My London based colleagues were great, representing a variety of different cultures and ethnicities. I would say only about sixty percent of them were actually british. Most of them were thrilled by the opportunity to work for Moneybox and infected by the company vision and recent success. It seemed like everyone was really enjoying their work, operations officers, analysts, software engineers and even us testers :). A lot of people were into fitness and healthy lifestyle in general. Occasional football, jogging or badminton during the day were encouraged by the owners.

I was originally hired as a technical tester and supposed to test the backend of a new transactional platform. Later on my duties extended to mobile apps and API testing. I spent most of the time working with tools such as Postman, Charles Proxy and MSSQL. My direct colleagues were frontend and backend software engineers, all of them were easy going and willing to go the extra mile just to explain everything.

I eventually left, because I wanted to move towards automation testing or even frontend development, but wasn’t given the opportunity. It was a great experience I will never forget though. Who knows, perhaps I will seek a job abroad again in the future, the world has a lot to offer.