“Being conscientious and polyvalent are important qualities to be a successful Back-End Engineer.”

Discover our Qonto Insiders of the month: Félicie Godineau, Back-End engineer at Qonto

1. What did you do before joining Qonto (your education, professional experience etc.)?

I joined Qonto about 9 months ago, in early 2021, and it’s actually my second job since I finished my studies. Before that, I worked as an R&D developer in an SME. But Qonto is not the second company I’ve worked at. I graduated from EPITECH in 2019 and during my time there I had the opportunity to do many internships. For example, I had the chance to experience the beginning of Station F within a construction start-up.

2. Why did you join Qonto?

I mostly worked in small companies. By joining Qonto, I wanted to experience the scale-up world, where there are many things to be done and plenty of ambition but already a solid structure in place. I didn’t know about Fintech before being interested in working for Qonto. I find it particularly stimulating because I get to see how it works behind the scenes when people spend money. It’s (almost) life-changing to understand a bit more about what’s actually happening when you’re waiting for your card payment to be authorized!

3. How would you summarize the recruitment process?

The recruitment process is well organized. You know what to expect and also what is expected of you at each step in the process. There are 5 steps during which you meet people who are directly related to your potential Qonto career.

• Firstly, there is a meeting with a Talent Acquisition Manager to talk about your career plan and what motivates you.
• Then, you have a meeting with your (potential) future manager to get to know what your team is working on, how you will fit into the team and what working processes are in place.
• The next step consists of a skills test in the language of your choice to evaluate your level and understand how you work and think.
• The fourth step is, for me, one of the most important. During this meeting, you talk to two Qonto Back-End developers. As well as it being a less stressful meeting, it’s also a good time for you to ask questions about daily life as a Back-End at Qonto. It also helps both sides determine whether you’ll be able to work well together.
• The last step is a discussion with the Head of Back-End, where you talk about how you see yourself at Qonto.

I really liked that at each step, the interviews work both ways: you try to determine if you’re a good fit for Qonto but also if Qonto is a good fit for you.

4. What stood out for you about the onboarding process?

What stood out for me is the amount of time that is dedicated to your onboarding. The first week is essentially about giving you a full picture of Qonto. You really get an insight into what Ops, Product, Sales, Growth and Tech are working on. It shows the importance of each part of the company and how those parts all interact together to create Qonto. Meeting someone from each department of the company, as well as doing the onboarding alongside new joiners from different teams, helps enforce collaboration between teams.

5. Tell us about what you do as a Back-End engineer at Qonto.

As a Back-End engineer at Qonto, my role is to develop new features and ensure the quality and scalability of the application. We follow the feature throughout its entire life cycle: design, developing, testing, delivering, monitoring and maintaining.

I am working within the Ledger team. We’re in charge of the accounting. We handle the system that authorizes and stores transactions. We are currently working on cool features like F24, a feature that allows Italian clients to pay their taxes through their Qonto account. We’re also partnering with October to give clients the opportunity to borrow money.

6. What are the qualities required to be a successful Back-End engineer?

One of the most important qualities you need as a Back-End engineer is to be conscientious. In development, you need to be very careful about what exactly you are changing in the code and the consequences it will have. Even if code reviews can back you up on this, you still need to be conscientious enough to carry out code reviews for your peers. Also, a Back-End engineer needs to be polyvalent. Our tasks vary greatly and relate to many different topics like data, APIs, or even emailing. It’s not uncommon to work with multiple programming languages (for example, at Qonto, we use Go and Ruby on Rails).

7. How would you summarize your day-to-day life as part of the Qonto Tech team?

The day starts with a short daily meeting where we share our progress and discuss any sticking points on current tasks.

Then, I spend my time designing and developing new features, doing code reviews and fixing bugs. When designing new features, we create a document called the Dive-In. This contains all our thoughts on how we will develop the new feature. It starts with the context and the problem we are trying to solve, then goes on to detail how we want to solve it. It includes all the potential issues we may encounter, the QA plan and the slicing. The Dive-In is reviewed by the whole team so they can acquire the knowledge on the subject along with us.

In Back-End, we usually work in pairs. When we start a new subject, we both create the Dive-In and assign tasks. When necessary, we always like to do some pair programming. Working in pairs helps a lot in knowledge transmission. It also challenges your ideas and helps you foresee the possible outcomes and potential issues. Pairing on a project really helps to deliver quality.

8. What has been your biggest challenge and/or greatest success as a Back-End engineer?

At the moment, I’m working on scalability topics and that’s probably my biggest challenge. By referring to the KPIs of our team, we detect the functionalities that didn’t age well. For anything that is too slow, too consuming or too complex, we try to find a way to scale it.

The most challenging part of this task is finding a solution that will last over time, no matter how big Qonto becomes. It requires major refactoring and a better understanding of our data and how we use it.

Scaling improvements usually go unnoticed by our clients but are, nonetheless, great successes within the Tech team.

9. Which of Qonto’s 4 values (Ambition, Mastery, Teamwork, Integrity) resonates with you the most and why? What do you appreciate most about the Qonto Way?

Definitely teamwork! Teamwork brings better ideas, helps you avoid mistakes and generally makes your day better.

About the Qonto Way, I like the fact that we take a lot of time to think about what we’re doing, ask why we’re doing it, and imagine how we can build it together in the most efficient and qualitative way. And, if we fail at doing something qualitative, we take the time to think about why we failed and how we can improve.

10. If you could speak to future Qonto candidates, what would you tell them?

There are many projects ongoing at any given time and many more ideas that will need to be implemented soon. As a scale-up, there are a lot of tech challenges to tackle to improve the scalability and the quality of our service. So, if you want to keep learning and to contribute as part of a team to this huge project, Qonto is a great place for you!

11. Do you have a fun anecdote you would like to share about your time at Qonto?

The second week after I joined Qonto, my team had an online team building exercise (we were under Covid curfew at that time). We played Code Names online and I came out as the winner! In the end, everyone wanted to be on my team. Somehow, it was a good way to make my own place within the team. 😉