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Established in 2008 by South Africans with our head office in Silicon Valley, Jemstep by Invesco helps investment advisors to scale their businesses by providing a platform for client engagement, onboarding and servicing.

Our development team, based in Sandton, Johannesburg, have a strong focus on Functional Programming and mostly use Scala for development.

Cutting Edge Technology

We mostly use Scala for development, with a strong focus on Functional Programming while still incorporating some aspects of Object-Oriented development.

Our primary server-side components include the Play framework, Akka, MongoDB and Redis.

Our development methodology

We use a hybrid of Kanban and Extreme Programming. Our core focus is on delivering value to end users as efficiently as possible.

Deployments are fully automated, driven by our DevOps culture.

We drive continuous improvement (Kaizen): As a team we change our processes regularly, often as part of a retrospective outcome. We are not afraid to try and discard new ideas, as long as it makes us more efficient at delivering value.

About Invesco - What we do globally

Goal - Helping investors worldwide achieve their financial objectives.

Great ideas transcend borders. With more than 750 dedicated investment professionals worldwide and on-the-ground presence in 21 countries, serving clients in more than 150 countries. Invesco has the global capability to deliver our best ideas to investors around the world. Our clients benefit from our:

• Commitment to investment excellence • Depth of investment capabilities • Organizational strength • Global footprint

Our team within Invesco - What we do in our South African office

Our team, Jemstep by Invesco, is uniquely position as a digital advice innovation group within Invesco and we are a leading provider of technology solutions to investment advisors (RIAs) and broker-dealers in the USA. Our advisor platform, Jemstep Advisor Pro, helps investment advisors scale their businesses efficiently through harnessing the best practices of technology for client engagement, onboarding and servicing. We offer our partners a full suite of technology solutions that are highly flexible, customizable and easily integrated into existing systems.

History – Where we come from

Originally established as Jemstep Inc. in 2008 our team has an established track record of introducing new and multi-patented technologies for the wealth management industry.

The company’s early founders and funders were South African’s with the ambition to build a company that could provide quality, unbiased and sophisticated wealth management advice. As an early and innovative entrant into digital advice we built a B2C “robo-advisor” before the term was even coined and more recently we were also one of the first digital platforms to focus exclusively on helping advisors deliver professional advice to their clients online.

While our head office is in Silicon Valley the majority of our development is done by our self-managed, highly skilled, cutting edge team based in Sandton, Johannesburg. Over the past 9 years the team work ethic and our culture has been created (or perhaps forged is a better word) by the many ups and downs associated with a start-up. So we’ve been through a lot, seen a lot and we’re incredibly excited about the future.

Acquisition – Start-up flexibility and culture with corporate benefits and comforts

In January 2016, Jemstep was acquired by Invesco Ltd. which is a leading independent global investment management firm operating in more than 20 countries; the firm is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol IVZ (www.invesco.com) and part of the S&P 500 index.

Post-acquisition we have rebranded to Jemstep by Invesco and the acquisition has opened up unbelievable opportunities for us. As a result we are looking to grow the team to meet these exciting opportunities.

Importantly for us, unlike with most acquisitions, Invesco isn't looking to consume and change us; they understand what has made us a successful team and know that we require a “start-up” culture and flexibility to thrive. Instead of changing us, Invesco are giving us the resources, opening doors that may have been closed to us in the past and looking to leverage the potential they see in our business combined with their expertise, reach, business and partners.

So we find ourselves in a unique position where we get to function like we have previously, as a flexible start-up, with the security and vast opportunities offered by being part of a large multinational.

Our approach to work

We pride ourselves on being nimble, flexible and cross functional while using innovative technologies. Our team in Joburg has over 52 excellent members with a variety of skills and experience and we’re seeking talented software and systems engineers to help us in our mission of delivering world-class technology solutions to investment advisors and their clients.

Our team culture

We firmly believe that our team culture has been the reason for our historic success and will be the defining reason for meeting our future goals. We want to hire people who believe what we believe in and for this to happen a candidate needs to know their purpose and this should be aligned with ours.

Furthermore we operate in a rapidly changing, dynamic and competitive environment, because of this and given our history we’re a little different from most tech companies. To work with us we demand the best of our team and candidates should be prepared to work within an exciting but hard-working culture:

• Environment and processes – Smaller, nimble and dynamic
• Flat structure – Freedom to interrogate and question method, tech and process
• Ambitious – both at an individual and team level while being 100% focused on meeting our goals and targets
• Attitude – Team members are driven, smart, ambitious and constantly encouraged to use their initiative to propel themselves, the team and business forward

Hiring Process

Our interview process consists of two separate interviews and we encourage candidates to get involved and ask questions. Hiring is a two way street and the best decisions are made with certainty so we want candidates to be informed and 100% comfortable with the role and the company by the end of the hiring process:

Initial interview

The first consists of an approx. 40 min interview where both parties get an opportunity to get a good sense of each other. As highlighted previously, we believe that maintaining and improving on our team culture is critical to our future success so in the interview we want you to get a really good idea of both our dev, the team dynamics and culture. There is also a coding exercise which takes about 40 mins.

We prefer to do the initial meeting face to face but understand that sometimes this isn't possible or convenient so we can do this via VC (Skype, Google hangouts etc.)

Final Interview

The second interview is 3 hours long with different sections of the team and it is broken into 3 separate hour slots consisting of:

1. Cross functional - this is with two team members that won't work directly with you, however as we are a close knit team and highly cross functional it’s important that you meet a larger portion of the team to get a sense of who you will be interacting with on a daily basis.

2. Technical - this is with two developers that you would be working with, as the name suggests it is strongly focused on technical abilities and it gives you the chance to ask them about our dev environment.

3. Structured - the final slot is done with another two developers. We believe that it’s important you meet to ensure personality fit, manage expectations and give you the opportunity to ask them about the company.

If both parties are happy to proceed we’ll offer you a permanent position.