The Scale Factory

The Scale Factory was established in London in 2009, the same year in which ‘DevOps’ as a concept first became popular. Since then, our team of experienced site reliability engineers, solutions architects and DevOps specialists have helped organisations of all sizes design, build and manage the foundations of their digital businesses.

We worked with AWS and other cloud platforms for a number of years, then decided to focus on AWS. We’re now an Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner, and work with a range of operating systems.

We’re a remote-first team, and always have been. We have a small HQ in London Bridge, and our AWS certified engineers and solutions architects are scattered across the UK. Besides having realised the benefit remote working holds for many people a while ago, this approach supports one of our core values: to put people first.

Our company values are important to us. They define how we act towards each other, and with our customers.

We put people first. The Scale Factory is a people business more than it is a technology business. We prioritise the health and wellbeing of our own team, and will pull the plug on any customer engagement which puts those at risk. We will not engage with suppliers who don’t feel the same way about their own staff.

We include everyone. We recognise that our personal time, our relationships, and our lifestyles are fundamentally more important than our work. We strive to provide a flexible work environment that can adapt to our varied home lives, not the other way around. We celebrate the things that make us different from one another. We recognise that our industry is discriminatory and we wish to avoid contributing to this problem within our own organisation.

We act with empathy and compassion. We always assume positive intent. We understand when we see suboptimal work that the people responsible were doing the best job they could, within the constraints and context they had at the time. We understand that our colleagues and our clients are only human, with their own complex lives, and we interact with kindness at all times.

We work best as a team. We are stronger when we work together, and we seek out opportunities for collaboration. We deliver faster, and at a higher quality, when we can team up and learn from each other. We know when to ask for help and know that we can do so safely and without judgement. We make space for togetherness, and to build the relationships necessary for effective teamwork.

We’re trusting, trustworthy and open. We know that our people are smart, and can make their own decisions, acting in the best interests of the customer and the business. We don’t have overbearing processes or big corporate rule books, because we know our team will do the right thing, or ask for the help they need. We communicate effectively, and share information freely with each other. Our customers trust us because they know we’ll be straightforward and honest with them.

We have a bias towards action. We make decisions quickly and act on them. We recognise that failure is an important part of success and that failing fast is important so that we can learn and move on. We embrace change where it is required, but we avoid making change for its own sake.

We’re always learning. We make time to improve our craft, and to learn new technology and interpersonal skills. We welcome mistakes as a learning opportunity. We use feedback loops to examine how we work, amplifying successful behaviours and correcting those that keep us from our goals. We give our time to share skills and teach others.

We’re good at what we do. We apply our knowledge and experience appropriately. We’re mindful of cost and time constraints, and we understand the need to trade technical purity or completeness against the need to deliver. We understand the value of simplicity, and the power of boring. The work that we do may not change the world, but it is meaningful. We deliver solutions that match the needs of the customer above all else.