Juliette Sinibardy, Software Engineer @ Pennylane
Hi Juliette! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I’m a 28-year-old software engineer, and I joined Pennylane in September 2021. Before that, I worked as a software engineer in another SaaS startup (shipup.co). It actually was my first engineering job — I graduated from Sciences Po in Economics and worked as a manager for several years before making the switch to development.
Apart from coding, I mostly spend my time doing outdoor activities (🏊♀️, 🚶🏻♀️, 🏇🏻) or playing some video games with a cat on my lap.
Why did you choose to join Pennylane?
I wanted to join a company that offered flexible work. Living pretty far out in the countryside, I wanted to work fully remote, and yet have the opportunity to work in a beautiful office when I felt like socializing with my colleagues. Pennylane, with its distributed technical team (all across Europe / Middle East) and its WeWork offices, was a perfect fit!
It didn’t hurt that the compensation package and health plan (Alan Blue) were quite attractive. 😉
However, some other companies did offer those same perks, so I hesitated quite a lot before signing an offer.
The decisive factor for me was the product’s ambition.
In my previous life as a manager in an SME, I often had to juggle between a lot of accounting and administrative tasks, and I know that using Pennylane would have saved me from a lot of headaches. I thought that if a company could become a major player in its market — that was the one. And I wanted to be part of that ride!
An anecdote to share about the recruitment process?
I thought the recruitment process was very quick! I had about 4 interviews, and they took place in less than a week. I really appreciated Nicolas (Talent acquisition manager)’s disponibility and sincerity. I asked him a lot of questions after my offer, and received thorough and well-thought-out answers.
Among Pennylane’s values (Supporting SMEs; Community of Builders; Radical Trust) which speaks to you the most and why?
I think the one that speaks to me the most is: Supporting SMEs. As a software engineer, my work can sometimes feel pretty abstract. However, at Pennylane, we have a very short feedback loop and as a result, you quickly hear from happy customers once your new feature is rolled out. But it’s a double-edged sword: when something doesn’t work properly, you also know it fast!
Overall, knowing your hard work is making a difference to some SMEs is an awesome feeling.
What struck you most during your first weeks at Pennylane?
I really liked the onboarding process. Each month, the first week is dedicated to welcoming newcomers. Each department takes the time to do a presentation about who they are and what they do at Pennylane. It’s a great way to meet new people and understand what’s at stake in the company.
The tech & product team is organized in squads; can you tell us about their organization and your work?
The tech team is divided into different squads, with each: one Product Manager, one Product Designer, and about 5–7 software engineers.
Each squad’s mission is clearly defined, with its related OKRs. Each squad is free to organize itself how its members see fit. Some squads use ‘Shape-Up’, others some light version of Scrum — Pennylane is at its core a very decentralized company and it can be shown in how squads choose to organize themselves.
I’m currently working in the Invoicing squad, which is the one responsible for building our invoicing tool, destined to SME owners (SMEs can use Pennylane to directly invoice their customers and we automate the related accounting entries). Our goal is to help SMEs by making sales management easier, and by helping them get paid on time.
Internal mobility is encouraged, according to employees’ preferences and the company’s growth.
I think the possibility to switch squads happens every 6 months approximately. I really appreciate this opportunity, as it allows engineers to broaden their understanding of the product and work with new colleagues while staying in the same company.
Which stack & tools do you use at Pennylane?
Our main codebase is a Ruby on Rails x ReactJS (in TypeScript) monolith. We’re always up-to-date when it comes to versions — eg. as in December 2021, we’re with Ruby 3.0.3, Rails 6.1 (soon Rails 7), and ReactJS 17.0.2.
Our whole deployment process is fully automated. We use Heroku as our cloud platform, and use various tools to log and monitor our services (eg. DataDog, Sentry, Sidekiq, etc.).
To make some of our data more accessible to various stakeholders (ie. product managers, the marketing team, etc.), we use Metabase and Castor. And to communicate with the team, we use Slack and Notion. 🤓
The tech team is working remotely; how do you manage to create comradeship in that setting?
That’s a great question! Having friendly relationships with my colleagues is very important for me, and I was anxious about this aspect of remote work.
So how do we create some comradeship?
We have some weekly squad team-building time, even remotely (playing some online games, talking…), which gives us an opportunity to speak to each other without some work context.
Additionally, every 2–3 months, the “Tech Days” are organized in our Paris office. Every engineer and product member is present (even though we’re currently having a hard time with visas for some of our foreign colleagues 😔), and we use this time for a lot of team-building activities (laser game, cocktail/cooking class, climbing…). It allows us to put a face next to each Github username. 🤓 This week is always very high energy and it’s refreshing to see everyone.
Finally, we have some company offsites organized periodically (the last one was in June 2021, the next is in March 2022). Everyone from the company is invited, with lots of activities planned by our amazing HR team. Looking forward to my first one!
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