Hello, my name is… Mathilde (Application Engineer)

“Hello, my name is…” is a new series of stories introducing you to some of our shopper technology team at The LEGO® Group in London, offering an insight in to our engineers and product owners, what they do and what a typical day looks like for them.

This first story is about Mathilde who is a JavaScript Application Engineer at the LEGO Group.

So what does an Application Engineer do?

I produce software for LEGO.com. I am part of the ‘À La Cart’ squad and we focus mainly on maintaining our checkout and building new features for customers to have a smooth checkout experience when they are purchasing LEGO products online.

I am responsible for…

Day to day I can usually be found developing new features or fixing broken elements or bugs we find on the site.

If a customer is experiencing a problem in the checkout that is keeping them from completing a purchase, they often contact consumer services who try to get as much information as they can about the issue at hand and then pass it on to our product owners who will research and describe the problem so that we can reproduce it in our local environment and find where the problem is.

We also get a lot of alerts and information from our logging systems so we spend a lot of time looking at these to see what’s happening for shoppers on the site. Sometimes it can be related to specific rules for a certain country and we have to figure out how to cater for that in our shop.

A while back I worked closely with two other developers in the squad to build a track-and-trace-service for customers to track delivery of their orders from our warehouse all the way to their front door.

My commute to work…

I’m based outside of London and so I get the train to work. I love to read and I usually have a book with me or listen to a podcast.

I got this job…

Whilst I was working as a project manager in admissions at a university I ran a project implementing a new online application system.

This allowed me to work closely with the developers and I was very inspired by the problem-solving elements of their role so when I got the chance to take a sabbatical from work I decided to learn to code.

It started out as just a hobby project for me but along the way I found that I enjoyed coding so much I decided to pursue it as a career.

I spent some time studying on my own but it was when I joined a coding bootcamp in London that my learning really accelerated.

I’ve been working at the LEGO Group for about 18 months now — I started as a Junior Application Engineer and I was promoted to the next level of Application Engineer about 8 months ago.

My most memorable moment at the LEGO Group so far…

It’s hard to just think of one memorable moment! A couple of weeks after I joined, I remember sitting at my desk in the office and smiling. I realised that I actually managed to get a job somewhere where I could be myself, have fun, learn every day and deliver loads.

The best part of my job…

I think the best part of my job is working with other people who are as excited about their job and about coding as I am. At the LEGO Group, we’re encouraged to be curious and to bring play into our everyday life. We get to play and learn new skills every day! Sometimes, we even get to build the new sets in the office to put them on display for visitors.

In the evenings…

I try to go to developer meet-ups a couple of times a month and you might also find me at a yoga class or meeting with friends — but usually I go home to cook delicious food and then binge some Netflix with my boyfriend.

The technology I’m most excited about right now is…

I like to learn and try to pick up tickets that will expose me to things I haven’t done before. I try to work across the full stack and over my time at the LEGO Group so far I’ve moved from working on the front end with React to working on our Node.js backend which is entirely in the serverless world.

What makes a good Application Engineer and do you have any advice to new people?

Be curious and be ready to learn. Don’t be afraid to fail or admit that there are things you don’t know.

You are not the sole owner of the piece of code you’re currently working on and everything that you do should bring the code to a better place than it was before — even if it means handing it over to someone else to improve it.

Everybody should be focused on the bigger picture: to improve LEGO.com for our LEGO fans!

Would you like to join Mathilde at the LEGO Group?

We’re growing our team in London and we’re looking for new colleagues right across our team — including Application Engineers at all levels, Engineering Managers, DevOps specialists, Product Owners and more.

You can find more details about current positions and how to apply to join us on the LEGO.com careers website.