December 13, 2021
How Panther champions talent over geography with Prisma
Panther fully leverages Prisma and a cutting edge tech stack to power a domain-driven architecture that allows its developers to build and maintain seamlessly a complex platform with multiple services. This allows Panther to ensure that its customers can automate global payroll and compliance for their remote teams with one click.
In the last few years, it's become clear that technology and society have evolved to make remote work more viable for a wider variety of positions. Digital nomads, hybrid office models, freelancing, and distributed teams have been on an upward trend.
Companies are looking to prioritize talent over location, spanning over multiple time zones and cultures. Panther enables this cultural shift, making the transition to a remote workforce painless.
Panther takes care of hiring, onboarding, payroll processes, benefit and labor law compliance in more than 160 countries so that organizations can focus on the value-adding operations.
Prisma 💚 microservices
The most common software architecture patterns when building applications are the monolith and microservices patterns. There's no doubt that this is a controversial topic as both patterns have their pros and cons. Incorrect implementation of either pattern leads to negative consequences and technical debt.
Panther is doing a great job embracing the domain-driven approach to designing and architecting its platform to take full advantage of microservices. The microservices pattern was imposed on them as Panther's platform consists of many moving parts independent of each other.
Despite the microservices pattern being imposed on Panther, all services are available from a federated GraphQL API. One of the reasons contributing to the successful adoption is using Prisma to interact with their database.
Vasil Popovski, the Co-founder and CTO at Panther, shared values that Prisma brought to their codebase: faster time to market, developer productivity, type-safety, and guaranteed data structures of the data that gets funneled through the GraphQL API. A few other benefits that Panther enjoys include automation when processing payments and ease of working with different currencies with a single click.
"On the operational side, I did a lot of investigation on whether Prisma was going to be supported by its creators - whether its something we can rely on and will be here in the long run. I also looked at the community, which is an important factor when switching to a new technology and finally the completeness of the documentation. All these combined gave us the confidence to choose Prisma"
Architecture deep dive
Panther's technical considerations when building their platform included performance, scalability, and stability of the tools and libraries. The core of the platform is built using TypeScript and runs on Node.js.
Their stack consists of the following tools and services:
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- GraphQL with Apollo Federation
- React
Panther also utilizes dataloaders to optimize their application by allowing batching and caching of requests while working with remote data sources.
"We have to rely on a lot of internal APIs and Prisma guarantees that the data and the shape of the data that gets funnelled through the main GraphQL API at the end, is valid and is of a specific shape."
Panther's Engineering Culture
Panther believes that, if done right, remote work can be much more productive and beneficial than office work. For this reason, they are a 100% remote company, that tailors their benefits and culture for a global team. This is a sentiment Prisma shares in full, given that we're also 100% remote!
As Vasil Popovski explained during the Prisma Day ‘Prisma in Production’ panel, when building their team and their products, their focus is on "talent-first", enabling their developers and users to do their very best work, without being hampered by geographical barriers or administrative overhead.
Panther is experiencing tremendous growth, with $2.5M raised in the last investment round and an ever-expanding team. Explore more the career opportunities at Panther here.
Conclusion
Prisma can be leveraged using your architecture of choice and Panther is a stellar example of how to implement all the latest technologies, leveraging them to their fullest capabilities, in a seamless architecture.
Panther is keen on ensuring optimal performance of their platform in each layer. For this reason they are excited to use the Prisma Data Proxy, which allows you to connect to your database without exhausting database connections in a serverless environment.
To learn more about Panther from Vasil, check out the Prisma Day ‘Prisma in Production’ panel:
To find out more about how Prisma can help your teams boost productivity, go to prisma.io/enterprise
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