The Aircall Engineer Journey: Part I | Joining Aircall

Welcome to our series about the Aircall engineering journey. Learn more about your first day, first weeks, and what to expect during your first quarter. See our current openings. 

Aircall is growing fast. We’re hiring engineers in France, Spain, and the UK.

As an engineering manager, I’ve participated actively in this process, interviewing and hiring many standout engineers in the last year and, far from the rest, the questions everyone asks before joining are “What is the day-to-day like at Aircall?” or “What will my first days be like?”

So if you want to know what your life as an engineer at Aircall will look like from your very first day to the end of your first year, we created this series for you. This post will cover the hiring experience and the post-offer stage, but I encourage you to follow along to get a sense of your first weeks, your first quarter, and then finally your first year.

Hiring a village

Ok, Aircall is growing exponentially (we’ve doubled in size each year since 2019), so onboarding is a big part of our day-to-day, even for engineering teams.

This means that the common strategy of “Hey, can you help the newbie install the IDE and download the code?” most startups follow doesn’t really work for us.

The key is not to improvise. That starts by having an explicit onboarding process, which needs to be improved continuously, based on three different layers: the most general (what we call the Aircall Launchpad), with the next layer being high-level engineering onboarding, and finally the last is the nitty-gritty info you need to know on your squad. All our training materials are then supported by an internal learning platform.

Before your first day

Congratulations! You’ve received an offer to join one of the Aircall Engineering teams.

You’ve passed the hiring process: You have a strong tech background and share our values, you showed your design skills, and you beat the tech challenge by solving an Advent of Code problem or doing a pair-programming session.

I’m sure you’re excited to meet your new teammates, get to know the project and the technology, and start contributing to Aircall’s product, but first, we have a few t’s to cross.

While you’re notifying your former employer and transitioning projects, sharing contact info with your colleagues, and taking some time off to rest before joining us, we’re working behind the scenes to give you a warm welcome. We’re choosing your buddy, ordering your welcome pack, and enrolling you in onboarding courses.

Beyond taking some time to rest and tie up loose ends, if you’re near one of our offices, we highly encourage you to stop by or meet up with your new team (of course keeping pandemic precautions in mind). 

From there, you’re ready to start your new job! Up next in our series? A deep dive on your first day.

Special thanks to our friends at Aircall for their insights on this topic.