CULTURE
Life at Brilliant
Three offices, one engineering culture. This page describes how we actually work day to day — the reviews, the rituals, the hybrid policy and the things people tell us they value most.
How We Work
Brilliant Esystems grew out of a small Kano software team in 2014 and it still behaves like one in the ways that matter. Decisions are written down, disagreement is expected, and seniority is not a substitute for an argument. Our directors sit in the same open floors as everyone else, and the design review that decides how a government revenue platform will handle offline reconciliation is open to anybody in the practice who wants to attend. That is not a slogan; it is how the calendar is arranged.
The headquarters at Plot 14, Ahmadu Bello Way in Kano holds the largest share of our staff, the network operations centre and the ICT Training Academy. The Abuja office at Bassan Plaza in the Central Business District is our public-sector and consulting base, closest to the federal ministries, departments and agencies we serve. The Lagos office on Adeola Odeku Street, Victoria Island, carries financial services and telecommunications work. Teams are frequently split across two of the three, so we have had to become genuinely good at distributed working rather than pretending everyone is in the room.
We work bilingually. Hausa and English are both spoken freely in the corridors, in stand-ups and in client meetings across the north; written artefacts — code, documentation, tickets, client reports — are in English so that every office and every client can read them. Nobody is asked to conduct a conversation in a language they are less comfortable in for the sake of appearances, and colleagues who arrive from Lagos or the south-east routinely pick up working Hausa within a year because their teammates are patient teachers.
The pace is real but it is not performative. Core collaboration hours are 10:00 to 16:00, prayer times are respected and blocked in the calendar, and we do not celebrate people who answer messages at midnight. Where a service carries a 24/7 obligation — our managed services and security operations do — it is covered by a published rota with standby allowances, not by an unspoken expectation that engineers will always be reachable.
What We Hold Ourselves To
Six principles that appear in our review conversations, our post-mortems and our promotion criteria.
Everything is reviewed
Code, designs, client reports
No change reaches production without a second pair of eyes. Pull requests need one approval for routine work and two for anything touching authentication, payments or personal data. Reviewers comment on the code, never on the person, and a review that only says "LGTM" on 800 lines is treated as a review that did not happen.
Pair when it is hard
Not a mandate, a habit
We pair on the difficult third of the work: unfamiliar subsystems, tricky migrations, production debugging and the first week of any new joiner. Teams typically pair six to ten hours a week. It is the fastest way we know to move knowledge between people, and it is why a single engineer leaving rarely takes a system with them.
Blameless post-mortems
Within 5 working days
Every severity-1 and severity-2 incident gets a written post-mortem covering the timeline, the contributing factors and the corrective actions with named owners and dates. We look for the missing guardrail, not the guilty engineer. Post-mortems are published internally and the corrective actions are tracked to closure in the quality management system.
Learning Fridays
Friday afternoons, protected
From 14:00 on Fridays the delivery calendar is closed. People use the time for certification study, internal talks, tooling work, reading, or teaching at the academy. It is not optional in the sense that managers may not book over it; it is optional in the sense that nobody audits what you did with it.
Guilds cut across teams
Seven active guilds
Backend, frontend, cloud, security, data, quality and delivery guilds each meet fortnightly across all three offices. Guilds own the standards — coding conventions, reference architectures, the tooling list — so that a team in Lagos and a team in Kano solve the same problem the same way. Chairing a guild is a recognised leadership step.
Say the difficult thing early
Especially about dates
A slipping milestone raised in week two is a planning problem; the same slip raised in week ten is a client problem. Managers are assessed partly on whether their teams bring bad news early, and we have never disciplined anyone for flagging a risk that turned out to be real.
Inside the Offices
The Kano headquarters runs on a hybrid pattern: three days on site, two days wherever you work best, agreed with your team lead and fixed for the quarter so that colleagues can plan around it. Tuesday and Wednesday are anchor days when almost everyone is in, and those are the days we schedule design reviews, guild meetings and client workshops. Roles that cannot be hybrid — network operations centre shifts, data centre field engineering, on-site client support — are advertised as such from the beginning, and they carry a site allowance.
The building has quiet rooms for focused work, two dedicated prayer areas with ablution facilities, a staff canteen with a subsidised lunch, and a small library that the guilds keep stocked. The Abuja and Lagos offices follow the same standards at smaller scale. Every office has a proper meeting room with good audio, because a distributed company that skimps on conferencing equipment is quietly telling remote colleagues that they matter less.
- Three days on site, two flexible — fixed by quarter, agreed with your lead
- Anchor days on Tuesday and Wednesday across all three offices
- Two prayer areas with ablution facilities at the Kano headquarters
- Subsidised canteen lunch and staff transport shuttle in Kano
- Standby allowance and time off in lieu for all rota-based roles
What the Last Staff Survey Said
87%
Would recommend us
FY2025 engagement survey
4.2 yrs
Median tenure
Permanent staff, all grades
68
Internal promotions
Over the last three years
31%
Women in technical roles
Up from 22% in 2022
A Typical Year Here
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January
Kick-off and salary review
The company all-hands in Kano sets the year’s objectives and reports the previous year’s results in full, including revenue and margin. Salary bands are re-published, annual reviews conclude and increases take effect from the January payroll. Every team writes its objectives for the first half in the same two weeks.
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March
Certification season
The bulk of funded certification examinations are sat in the first quarter, when delivery load is lightest. The academy runs internal bootcamps for AWS, Azure, CCNA, CCNP and Security+, and colleagues who passed the year before teach the sessions. Ramadan working hours are published in advance and adjusted across all three offices.
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April
Graduate trainee intake
The first graduate cohort of the year joins, along with the six-month industrial attachment intake. Teams that host a trainee or an intern nominate a supervisor, and the induction week fills the Kano training rooms. It is noisy, and it is when a lot of quiet knowledge gets written down properly for the first time.
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June
Mid-year review and guild summit
Half-year objectives close and promotion cases are heard by the level committee. The guilds hold a two-day summit where standards are revised and the reference architectures are updated. Anyone can submit a proposal; several of our current engineering conventions started as a summit paper from an Engineer II.
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September
Second intake and internal hack days
The September graduate cohort and the three-month attachment intake arrive. We also run two internal hack days where mixed teams build something useful for the company itself — the internal on-call handover tool and the incident timeline generator both came out of these.
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November
Annual retreat in Kano
Two days for the whole company, with colleagues flown in from Abuja and Lagos. Half of it is business — the strategy for the coming year, practice showcases, awards for the year’s best delivery — and half of it is deliberately not: football, a quiz, the long dinner where the newest joiners finally meet the people they have only ever seen on a call.
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December
Change freeze and close-out
A production change freeze runs from mid-December to the first week of January, with only emergency fixes permitted. The 13th-month payment and performance bonus land with the December payroll. Skeleton rotas cover managed services and the security operations centre, and everyone else takes the accumulated leave they have been putting off.
Everyday Realities
The small, concrete things people mention when we ask new joiners what surprised them in the first ninety days.
- Stand-ups are fifteen minutes and start on time; if it needs longer it becomes a separate call
- Prayer times are blocked in every calendar and meetings are not scheduled across them
- Hausa and English are both spoken freely; all written documentation is in English
- Your first pull request will get real comments in the first week — that is the welcome, not a warning
- Every engineer has a documented 30/60/90-day plan and a named buddy for the first three months
- Laptops are issued on day one, fully provisioned, with a monthly data allowance on top
- Friday afternoons belong to learning and no delivery meeting may be booked into them
- On-call is a published rota with a standby allowance and time off in lieu, never an assumption
- Mentoring pairs are matched twice a year across practices, so your mentor is rarely your line manager
- Staff clubs run football, a book circle, a Kano photography walk and an inter-office quiz league
- The canteen at the headquarters is subsidised and the shuttle covers the main Kano routes
- Directors run open office hours every fortnight that anyone may book without going through a manager
- Post-mortems are published internally with names removed from the causal chain but authors credited
- Nobody is expected to answer messages after hours unless they are the named on-call engineer
Questions About Working Here
How does the hybrid policy work in practice?
Can I move between the Kano, Abuja and Lagos offices?
What does mentoring actually involve?
Are there facilities for prayer and for Ramadan?
What are the guilds and can anyone join one?
Is the annual retreat compulsory?
How much travel should I expect?
Come and See for Yourself
If this is the way you want to work, look at what is open. If nothing fits today, write to us anyway — we keep speculative CVs for twelve months.