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By Scott Carey

Director of Editorial, News, InfoWorld

Lego, the manufacturer of plastic bricks, is expanding its teams of software developers rapidly to meet the increasing demand for virtual experiences.

Lego is rapidly expanding its engineering teams for software as it shifts from plastic bricks to bits and bytes but is it able to compete with top tech companies for the most skilled engineers?

The Danish company is investing heavily to transform into a more technology-enabled business following the explosion of popularity of online brick-building games such as Roblox and Microsoft’s Minecraft.

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In recognition of the missed opportunity, Lego announced a partnership with the videogame maker Epic in April of this year. The two companies will work together to create new experiences in the metaverse, blurring the lines between physical and digital creating experiences.

“The partnership with Epic represents our journey into the metaverse, and there is a huge product piece to work upon and the technology component to design for that,” Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief digital and technology officer at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.

Lego is looking to address these opportunities head on and build its in-house software engineering department. It is aiming to double its digital workforce to 1,800 by 2023. This will be based in offices in London, Shaghai, and Billund in Denmark.

Lego: Digital transformation powered by Lego

Bhardwaj explains how Lego can be more product-led and engineering-driven than it is today.

“I look at being product-led, as opposed to project-led,” he said, which means “defining the problems you solve as an array of digital products that you create and develop.”

In the process of making Lego Group more engineering-led, Bhardwaj wants to focus on the craft and architecture. “What is the most important engineering skill do you require to create world-class, scalable and efficient systems?” He asks.

Of course, software engineers will play an important role but the new digital recruits will be joined by designers, product managers, and technical program managers as the digital team grows.

Construction of a cloud-native technology infrastructure

These goals must be backed by a solid digital architecture. Bhardwaj wants Lego to build systems that “can expand, run 24/7 and are flexible, open and easy to connect with.”

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The company is currently building a new unified platform for data and is currently updating its infrastructure to allow it to be more flexible and cloud-native. Beginning with very little cloud usage just 18 months ago, Lego hosts 54% of its workloads in the cloud today, with plans to be 100% in the public cloud in the near future.

“We’re going for speed as well as responsiveness and flexibility, which the cloud provides,” Bhardwaj said. LET IT SING

Lego Group employs a wide range of languages and frameworks including Unity for certain of the new consumer-facing products, to React for Lego.com, and SAP ABAP for back-office systems. Bhardwaj said that “we’ve got almost everything.” “In the data platform, we are using Scala and Python. We are using what’s new today. If you are an engineer looking to learn more about an advanced tech stack You’ll find it here.”

Connecting with the Lego story

Software and Lego go hand-in-hand. Many engineers enjoy making physical models when they have spare time.

“Every person I interview has an Lego story to tell,” Bhardwaj said. “There is a connection with the Lego brand.”

Modular software components have long been marketed for their Lego-like capabilities that allow them to “snap on” to other components. This idea extends to Lego’s software building process, that makes use of APIs as well as loosely connected systems.

“When I talk about great architecture, it is like Lego bricks, in which we can construct something, break it apart and then rebuild it easily. “That’s what we’re trying create here,” Bhardwaj stated.