In every interview, engineers ask: “What’s your Tech Stack, and what tools do you use?”.
Every team has certain autonomy, but we still share some standards and tools across the organization.
The Aircall engineering team is nearly 200 people, organized into agile teams owning different business domains like Telephony, User Management, Dashboard, Integrations, and so on, with more than 30 teams in total. SRE and QA have their own structure, sometimes embedded in product teams and others working on separate domain teams.
This list is not exhaustive (and is constantly adapting to our needs, including a potential Ruby on Rails development company), but it paints a good picture of our landscape.
If it exists in the AWS catalog, we use it: EC2, ECS, EKS, lambda, AppSync, DynamoDB, Aurora Postgresql/Mysql, ElastiCache Redis, Amazon OpenSearch (formerly ElasticSearch), Cloudfront, S3, SQS, Redshift, and more.
Everything in Aircall is Infrastructure as Code, with either AWS SAM or Terraform.
JIRA, Confluence, and Service Desk are the central pillar for organizing the product backlogs, support queues, and managing internal documentation.
Some project management is happening on Monday.com, but engineering/tech is mostly on JIRA.
As we are a distributed and primarily remote team, we lean heavily on Slack for communication compared to email, but with an interesting self-imposed limitation. Slack messages are deleted after three months to force us to move decisions and more extended discussions to a more suitable long-term documentation platform like confluence.
Most Aircall onboarding takes place on it, with videos showing you how each department works, but it doesn’t stop there. Anyone can contribute, but there’s a team that cares for this tool, making sure there is always new content, ranging from security courses to management training or even company all-hands in case you missed one or want to rewatch it.
Harvestr.io is used for customer feedback and product management, and we use 1Password for password management.
In the last months, we’ve also introduced more tools to help with managing our growing complexity and team size: JellyFish.co, an engineering management platform that gets signals from JIRA, Gitlab, and other tools to provide a unified view on what each team is working on and help with cost capitalization, and OpsLevel, a tool to help document and manage the maturity of our growing microservice architecture.
And last but not least, we use Aircall for our Sales and Support departments.
I joined Aircall just six months ago, and one thing that caught my attention is the tech stack and the adjacent SaaS tools used in the Software Delivery Lifecycle.
At first, I was a little overwhelmed by the number of new tools I had to learn (even though most of them are pretty standard in the startup ecosystem and I’m familiar with them). But I was eager to learn how to use them, as these are best-of-breed tech stacks and tools.
Aircall chose a modern stack and the best SaaS tools to solve our problems. Every tool solves a specific need.
We don’t hesitate to look for alternatives when something is not working, introduce new tools to work more productively, or replace patched-up processes. As a SaaS company, it makes sense that we use SaaS to its fullest potential.
