A Glimpse Into Oura’s Tech Organization

We met with our CTO, Teemu Kurppa, to chat about Oura as a company and what inspires him to build a tech organization that can help millions of people improve their sleep quality, recovery, and activity.

Read more soon about Teemu’s own journey from building Oura’s tech organization from 1 to 120 members!

Oura’s Tech Vision

People are taking more and more ownership of their health, and they need tools on their journey to help do that. COVID-19 has sped up the integration of wellness and healthcare industries, and we are a part of that trend. Oura as a product is impacting peoples’ lives by being a part of preventative health care. Wellness products like Oura are used 24/7 and are used to track long-term changes in an individual’s health metrics. Those metrics can be used to spot problems early and can be an important factor in preventive health care. If the whole healthcare system can move towards preventive healthcare — i.e. we prevent serious illnesses by acting early, instead of trying to medicate people when they are already seriously ill — the overall impact to people's wellbeing is huge, and the monetary savings in reduced healthcare costs for society can be substantial.

The problems we are solving are both product-level and technical. We’re building a product that helps people make significant and impactful behavioural changes. I see Oura taking an even bigger role in the wellness and the preventative healthcare industry by leveraging integrated health data in unique ways — helping spot problems early, and solve people’s health issues before they happen.

To ensure we can be there to play our part in solving a global issue, we are building a global organization. Our vision is to build a global company, with diversity of culture and working cultures. We already have more than 20 nationalities and people working across the globe in our 3 main offices Oulu and Helsinki in Finland, and San Francisco in the USA. In addition we have people working in various cities like Zurich, Boston, and Toronto.?

There is so much we could do. But we need more talented tech professionals to help us with our ambitions and thus we plan to double our headcount every year for the upcoming years. Currently, we’re 250 people globally. In a few years time that number will be close to 1000 employees.

The Tech Problems We Are Solving

Our role in the IoT technology and health tech scene has a lot to do with our amazing hardware teams. Finland has a long standing tradition in great wearable/handheld technology from companies like Nokia, Suunto and Polar, who are as much software as they are hardware companies. Oura is now amongst them. We are extremely proud to be an ambassador for Finnish consumer electronics on a global level.

Many IoT companies are facing similar challenges to Oura. There are many complex technical challenges around how to use and showcase the data that Oura collects to share valuable insights and create personalized content utilizing both old school AI and new machine learning things, including interesting UI challenges and cross stack problems.

We’re building end to end experiences, algorithms, connection and development environments for cloud, as well as simulation environments.

What’s interesting with wearables, in comparison to mobile phones, is that they can have multiple form factors. Some people prefer wrist devices, such as watches, rings, necklaces etc, while mobile phones are so similar these days — a piece of glass. What this means is that there is room for multiple players in the wearable market to combine data and bring cool, potentially life-changing things to the users. And there are opportunities for interesting collaborations between product companies.?

Oura’s Tech Organization

Oura as a product brings together scientists, firmware developers, app developers, data scientists/engineers, product development, hardware, design etc. On the software side you need multiple disciplines together to really leverage the full potential of what Oura can do for people.?

We’re working with a lot of the newest technologies. On the app side Swift and Kotlin are our go to with modern methodologies and libraries in use. AWS plays a big role. We use a lot of the existing cloud offering but also weave in Kubernetes, Python, and Typescript. For the ring’s middleware components, C and C++ are in heavy use. And we continue to consider new languages.?

Our product development and software squads work in a six-week cycle model with a two-week cooldown period. This means six weeks of working on a single problem or feature and a two-week planning phase in between. Within this cycle model, tech teams have full autonomy of how they operate and what they choose to work on next.

We have built squads that own a specific area. The whole team can influence the roadmap. People are not machines and can drive things forward.

We wanted to build a tech culture where people care about the features they are creating, end to end.

This can also be seen in our every day work, as each Oura employee uses the product. Some teams and individuals even feel comfortable to share their own personal sleep data with each other.

In our day-to-day work, we practice agile methodologies in global, cross-functional, and autonomous squads. Meaning that we have some company-wide all hands, our software engineering all hands, and our internal Oura “Tech Talks” (where we invite external speakers from different places and share learnings with one another). Each squad has ownership of how they work and organize, whether that be dailies, weeklies, Slack messaging, etc.

We’ve built a great infrastructure team that we’re heavily investing in now. It’s all about data and machine learning, the app platform, which makes it easy to develop certain features. It also allows the freedom to not worry about synchronizing the data.

Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about driving technical changes. It’s challenging when you are busy doing other stuff. We definitely made a lot of mistakes, and we are still paying for some of that legacy code, as it slows us down. It’s a hard balance to actively ensure the code is kept up to date. However, if we hadn’t made those software choices at the time, we might have sunk the entire ship. Nowadays, Antti Laitala and the Apps Team have made refactoring a big part of our feature development work. The code base stays fresh and we can build on that. This is something we evangelise.?

As a tech and engineering culture, I’d love to see us building new features across all levels. This can be a slow process, but if we can make it faster and nurture a more connected team culture that would be fantastic.

Oura as a Tech Employer

After all, the people make the product. Hiring is challenging, but retaining talent is even harder. It’s important to invest in our people and ensure that they can continue to grow and learn with us.?

What we’re really aiming to do is build an organization that is as flat and approachable as possible. We want people to feel safe and empowered to be vulnerable.?

People here take a lot of pride in what they do. They’re really interested in how to improve the product not only for the customers but for themselves. They try to break the code, use the ring, and see the improvements come to fruition end to end.?

It’s probably no surprise, but leads at Oura, like most Ouranians, care about wellbeing, especially that of their teams. They are always striving to ensure that the processes meant to care for our individuals are up to par. Most of our engineering leads are skilled engineers themselves (with a few exceptions in people focused roles), who can help coach the team members.?

At Oura, there are a lot of different things you can do from app development to machine learning utilizing the biodata to create health insights. We have a very flexible career path, as you can come in doing one thing and move to an entirely different area with different technical problem domains.?

With us, you’re joining a global growth journey — a fellowship, if you will — to help improve the way we live our lives as humans.

A place where you can take pride and ownership in your own work and help maintain and improve our "lightweight processes" -oriented company culture. Join us in improving the way we live our lives!

Cheers, Teemu

Learn more about Oura here and join our tech team in taking on the wellness tech industry!

Check out our open positions here.