Signicat Hackathon: Where Digital Identity Talent Comes To Play
Hiring experienced developers, architects and product people in Europe is highly competitive. The annual Signicat hackathon is one way we answer the questions candidates ask about impact, learning and trust. For a few focused days, people step away from their day-to-day work, form cross-functional teams and explore new ways of solving hard problems in digital identity and trust.
–“Innovation does not happen in isolation. The hackathon brings people together across teams and countries, lets them experiment without pressure, and shows what is possible when we trust people to explore.”
Why we run a hackathon every year at Signicat
The Signicat hackathon started as a simple idea from long-time Signicat engineer and leader Marcus Almgren. He loves the classic Commodore 64 demo scene where programmers met to impress one another with creative projects and wanted to bring a similar spirit into a digital identity company.
Three years later, it has become a tradition. Every November, people across Signicat clear their calendars for two days of intense focus and playful experimentation. But it is way more than playing around with ideas.
Nurturing real innovation
Our products sit at the intersection of identity, fraud, compliance and UX. The hackathon creates space away from day-to-day delivery so people can test ideas and try new technologies without production pressure.
Exploring new technology
The hackathon gives teams permission to explore tools outside the standard stack, from LLM to new device intelligence. Some of these experiments later become real product features.
Breaking silos across functions and countries
During the hackathon, colleagues from different countries and teams work side by side on shared problems. It is a practical way to understand each other and build something tangible together.
Attracting people who like hard challenges
Digital identity is about orchestrating trust between banks, fintechs, governments and end users. The hackathon appeals to people who enjoy that complexity and want to work on problems that matter.
Underneath the retro-inspired visuals and light-hearted awards sits a serious purpose. The Signicat hackathon is part of how we keep our engineering and product culture sharp.
How the Signicat hackathon actually works
Each year, we reserve around two working days for the event. The schedule is simple. A short welcome and rules of engagement, then focused build time where teams prototype and iterate, followed by demos, voting and an award ceremony.
The format is hybrid. All common sessions are streamed so that colleagues in any location can join live. At the same time, our offices host local viewing gatherings. People come together in meeting rooms or canteens, watch the demos together and cheer on their favourites. This makes the event inclusive for everyone in the organisation, whether they are actively participating or simply curious observers.
A jury of leaders from product, technology and commercial teams looks for customer value, technical originality, execution and collaboration. Alongside the jury vote, we run a people’s vote so that every Signicat can support the ideas that resonate with them. The awards are light-hearted, with categories such as smoothest pitch and most collaborative team, but the work behind them is very real.
Who takes part
The hackathon is open to the entire company, not only engineering. Developers and platform engineers are there in force, of course, but so are product managers, UX designers, data and machine learning specialists, security and compliance experts, customer success managers, sales colleagues and marketing teams.
In recent editions, we have seen teams that mix
- backend and mobile engineers working on secure identity flows
- fraud analysts and data scientists testing new risk models
- UX, product and customer success designing better onboarding journeys
- sales and marketing teams prototyping tools that help them understand buyers better
Anyone in the company can join, with or without an idea. If there's a problem that annoys you, the hackathon is the place to bring it. If you simply want to help, we will find you a team that benefits from your skills.
Themes and challenges
The themes always connect back to our mission in digital identity and trust, but they are broad enough to encourage creativity.
In past hackathons, teams have tackled topics from smoother, safer onboarding and faster integration of identity and data sources to better tools for operations, clearer fraud dashboards, improved developer experience and smart automation that saves colleagues time.
Because participants come from many departments, ideas often start from a practical pain point and later, in practice, become helpful for teams and customers.
Tools and tech
The Signicat hackathon is not a vendor showcase. Teams pick the tools they know or want to learn.
For hackathons that focus on automation and AI, we also set aside budget so that teams can experiment with new tools, from user testing and accessibility checkers to coding assistants and document review engines.
The goal is not to prescribe a single perfect stack. It is to let people choose the right tool for the idea they want to explore, then bring those learnings back into their teams afterwards.
–“Presenting live to the whole company was terrifying and fun in equal measure. The atmosphere in the chat and in the offices was incredibly supportive. It felt safe to show something that felt imperfect.”
- Signicat Hackathon 2025
The 2025 Signicat hackathon brought teams from across Europe into one intense, shared sprint. For one and a half days, engineers, designers, product and marketing people stepped away from the roadmap and went deep on problems in digital identity, fraud and onboarding. The brief was simple. Use the building blocks we have, mix in the ideas you have always wanted to try and show what the future of trusted digital journeys could look like. For many participants, it felt like a glimpse of where our platform can go next, not just a break from business as usual. Several of the prototypes from this edition have since been developed further, either as internal tools or as input to future product features.
- Signicat Hackathon 2024
In 2024, the theme was automation and AI, with a clear focus on work that makes life easier for customers and for colleagues. Teams experimented with everything from code and content helpers to smarter ways of analysing complex documents and signals, always with real Signicat use cases in mind. The result was a wave of prototypes that showed how intelligence can sit inside our identity and fraud workflows instead of around them. A number of those ideas have already influenced production work, including the MintyAI assistant that helps users design compliant flows in Signicat Mint.
- Signicat Hackathon 2023
The 2023 automation hackathon set the tone for everything that followed. Fourteen mostly remote teams spent a concentrated burst hunting down repetitive tasks and manual checks and asking how they could design them away. Some projects focused on internal tooling and engineering productivity, others on longer-term product concepts, but all shared the same mindset. Do not add another process, build something that quietly removes friction. Several of the ideas first tried here have since found their way into everyday work, from improved observability and internal automation to early thinking that later shaped customer-facing features. It was the moment many people realised just how much freedom they have to shape how we work and what we build at Signicat.
–“We took a problem from customer success, prototyped a solution and by the end of the week, we already had interest from a real client. That sense of momentum is addictive.”
Turning ideas into impact
The hackathon is a celebration of the culture we already have. It brings together people who like to build, deliver and learn while having fun. That spirit makes it natural to carry the best ideas forward. Some hackathon ideas become internal tools that save colleagues time or make it easier to show what our platform can do. Others grow into improvements that customers see in our products. Some examples:
- A demo portal that saves time for our go-to-market teams and gives customers a clearer picture of what their future onboarding could look like.
- MintyAI, the assistant that helps people design compliant flows in Signicat Mint, which started as a prototype and evolved into the public beta we invite customers to try today.
- A cross functional team tried new ways to spot unusual activity in identity data, and the lessons later informed our fraud analytics work.
Hackathons have also been a safe place to explore new approaches to fraud detection using behaviour, device signals and machine learning. The lessons from those experiments support our wider strategy of real-time fraud prevention and risk orchestration across the customer journey.
Not every project turns into a product feature, and that is fine. Some become internal tools. Some are valuable learning journeys. Others resurface months later in a roadmap discussion when someone says “I saw this during the hackathon and I think we should build on it”.
The important point is that we treat the event as a serious source of ideas, not a Friday afternoon gimmick. At the end of each edition, people feel boosted, proud and grateful and a little tired in the best possible way.
What this means if you are considering Signicat
If you are a developer, architect, data engineer, SRE, product manager or UX designer, the hackathon is a good preview of your life here.
You work on problems that matter
Digital identity and fraud are not side projects. They decide who gets access to money, services and opportunities. At Signicat, you help build that trust, not another disposable app.
You get real room to experiment
Curiosity is expected, not a hobby. Once a year we stop the usual roadmap and give you focused time to explore new ideas and technologies. That mindset carries into normal projects as well.
You are trusted with ownership
Teams pick their own hackathon challenges, choose the approach and present straight to the company. The same trust and autonomy shape our product work day to day.
You build with people across Europe
You might pair with a developer in Vilnius, a designer in Oslo and a product manager in Spain on the same problem. If you enjoy smart people who see things differently, you will like this.
You join a culture that backs you
People here describe Signicat as friendly, supportive and serious about both customers and colleagues. The hackathon is that culture in fast forward. We celebrate solid engineering, clear thinking and simple solutions that remove friction.
If you read this and think “yes, that is how I want to work”, you will probably feel at home at Signicat.