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Meet the PRISMAtes and get to know our team! In this series, our employees tell us a little about themselves and their journey to PRISMA. Let's meet Pipo.
“Konnichiwa, everyone – and welcome to your Crash Course to Japanese!” A man with glasses and a blond ponytail smiles at the group seated in front of him. That man is Pipo. He’s giving this workshop as part of PRISMA’s company offsite.
“This is always a cool opportunity to share knowledge that has absolutely nothing to do with work in order to connect with colleagues and to broaden your horizon,” he explains.
His real name is Philipp Zins, but everyone calls him Pipo. He’s PRISMA’s Frontend Engineering Manager. “I’ve been a team lead for two years now, but I’m still actively coding myself.”
From Engineer to Team Lead
Pipo joined PRISMA in 2019 as a Software Engineer. Along with his résumé and cover letter, he included a photo of himself with his family — including his two children. “I also wrote right away that I was going to become a father again, just to be upfront about needing flexible working hours.”
Fortunately, that wasn’t an issue for PRISMA. One additional benefit in particular helped make daily life even easier: “PRISMA offers JobRad – and we used that to finance a cargo bike. I used to take the kids to daycare on it and head straight to the office. It was really great.”
Why He Made the Switch
“I wanted to work in a smaller company, and I thought it was really cool that English was the working language. Plus, I wanted to build software for a company that would actually use it long-term — not for short-lived campaigns.” That was already the case at his previous job, but things changed: “The company just got pretty big. Three new locations opened in a short time, and eventually, the structure no longer really fit the way we liked to work.”
When Pipo says “we,” he’s referring to his former colleagues Jörg Adler, Benjamin Otto and Uwe Schäfer. Today, all of them work at PRISMA — Jörg as Product Owner, Uwe as Infrastructure Architect, Benjamin as DevOps Engineer. “We had similar reasons for wanting to move on, but it was a coincidence. I mean, how rare is it that all the roles we were looking for were being filled with exactly the kind of requirements we had?”
Growing Responsibilities
When Pipo started at PRISMA in 2019, he was the only in-house frontend engineer. The whole internal team had just four developers, plus seven external colleagues. “It was a completely different setup compared to my previous job,” he recalls.
One successful initiative was the PRISMA Codecamp. Two candidates were set to be hired — one backend developer and one frontend developer: Mariana Moeira. “We started working together on her first non-student projects,” Pipo remembers. For nearly three years, the two worked side by side, until the team started growing again. “But even then, I always ended up handling onboarding and mentoring. Like with Kosta, who also started as a junior developer.”
So it felt like a natural step when Pipo officially became Frontend Engineering Team Lead in 2023. Additionally, he is working in two different teams to develop our Design System and Platform Features.
Going Beyond the Job
Even with a full workload, Pipo finds time to give workshops at offsites or kick off Open Space sessions — especially when something matters to him. “I introduced my idea for the POSS Fund there,” he explains. The POSS Fund — PRISMA’s Open Source Software Fund — is a sponsorship program for open-source projects PRISMA depends on technically, or wants to support for social reasons. Donations have already gone to Project Lombok, Vite, and Haecksen.org, for example.
When Everything Aligns
Having the chance to be heard and supported on projects like these is one reason Pipo feels at home at PRISMA. 
Another: “I love that the international aspect here is something people actually live. For example, we’ll occasionally have an Indian or African dinner — something colleagues organize themselves, just because they want to." It creates a completely different kind of connection, and Pipo really values that.
The same goes for friendships that extend beyond the workplace. Pipo and Jan Wagebach’s families, for instance, have gotten together several times. Their kids are around the same age.
“It worked out so well that the kids soon started hanging out without us adults.” A true match — both professionally and personally.
After five years, Pipo sums it up like this:
“We own the software that we build — with a team that has each other’s backs and is open to new ideas. At PRISMA, I get to grow, take on responsibility, and balance my family life and my job. It’s this sense of togetherness and the opportunity to personally contribute that make all the difference for me.”
