“Flexibility and curiosity are the two main qualities to succeed as a Tech Operations Principal.”

Discover our Qonto Insiders of the month: Florian Ellis, Tech Operations Principal at Qonto.

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

I studied as an engineer and then signed up for a special program where you start your career in the French administration, after two internships in the private sector. I did one of these internships at Dashlane in New York City. This is where I came to like the scale-up atmosphere 🚀

After that, I worked at the Banque de France. I switched to Tech by working as a freelance software engineer and then I had the opportunity to join Tracfin, the French financial intelligence unit, as a CTO. I stayed there for almost three years before joining Qonto in June 2021.

2. Why did you join Qonto?

Joining Qonto was a very deliberate move! I had been a customer of Qonto when I was a freelancer and I was a fan of the product (back in 2018). I knew that I wanted to join a fast-growing scale-up, ideally in Fintech and based in Paris. Qonto was on the top of my list and I contacted Aymeric Augustin, our CTO. He told me about the job of Tech Operations Principal, which didn’t really exist back then, and it immediately caught my interest. I sensed that I would have a lot to learn with Lean management and that the Qonto Way would provide me with powerful tools to help a team succeed.

3. How would you summarize the recruitment process?

Intense but smooth! The process was coordinated from start to finish by Samy Aumar, my point of contact in Qonto’s Talent Acquisition team. I did my first formal interview with him and he explained to me what the rest of the hiring process would look like. I understood it would be dense but I liked the fact that the overall duration of the process would only be a few weeks long. Samy gave me feedback shortly after each interview, which I appreciated.

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

I was genuinely amazed by how well it was organized! I received a detailed email on my personal address a few days before my arrival and I was able to set up most of my accesses (emails, Slack etc.) even before my first day. By the end of the first morning, we had heard a presentation on the company and its mission given by Alexandre Prot, one of Qonto’s cofounders, and we all had a laptop set up and ready to use. By the end of the first day, I already felt familiar with the office and welcomed to the team.

5. Tell us about what you do as a Tech Operations Principal at Qonto.

Fundamentally, the role of Tech Operations Principal exists because the Tech team is organized “by stack”: each of our CTO’s direct reports (they’re called “Heads”) is in charge of a part of our systems (back-end, web apps, mobile apps, data, security etc.).

Each stack has its specific challenges, but some topics concern the Tech team as a whole, and are more effectively managed at a transversal level. This is typically the case for training on our production and learning system, which we call the “Qonto Way”: these techniques apply almost identically to all stacks.

Concretely, being a Tech Operations Principal at Qonto means wearing many hats: trainer, coach, consultant, fireman… You can think of it as a “chief of staff to the CTO”, with a special focus on the implementation of the Qonto Way.

6. What are the qualities required to be a successful Tech Operations Principal ?

I think the two main qualities to succeed as a Tech Operations Principal are flexibility and curiosity.

You can imagine the variety of topics that bubble up to a CTO leading a team of 200+ engineers and managers! You need to adapt quickly to the topics on which you are tasked based on the priorities of the management team.

Curiosity is also essential, as you will need to learn a lot of things within a short timeframe, especially if you don’t have prior experience with Lean management.

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

My day-to-day life revolves mainly around:

• critical feature projects on which the team needs support,
• training and coaching the first line of managers (we call them “Leads”) on the Qonto Way, with the help and guidance of Tristan, our Lean expert,
• defining and promoting our best practices to deliver quality features to our customers at a fast pace (we call them “standards”). This typically involves a mix of discussions with team members and focus time spent on writing.

8. What has been your biggest challenge as a Tech Operations Principal ?

My biggest challenge was to help a team deliver a complex feature on which a significant delay was expected. I had to dive into the feature very quickly, understanding what we were trying to build, what had already been done, what remained to be done, what was the plan, what was slowing the team down, how we could remediate that… Knowing that you have little time to understand all this, and that the team cannot afford to spend hours explaining all of this to you — otherwise they will end up being even more late than before you came…

The team stayed united despite the pressure mounting, and in the end we shipped the feature to our customers with less delay than was initially anticipated.

9. You are about to take a new position within Qonto. Can you talk to us about the mobility process and why you made this choice?

After several years at Qonto, our Head of Web left in November of last year, leaving a gap in the management structure of the Tech team. Our CTO, Aymeric, asked me to take on the interim leadership of the team, as the job of Tech Operations Principal is close to a manager’s role, in some respects. As I have a deep interest for management, I was thrilled by the mission and dived right into it. A few weeks later, we agreed with Aymeric that I would take on the position on an ongoing basis.

This is also something you should consider if you join Qonto as a Tech Operations Principal: depending on your development goals and your performance, you may be given the opportunity to transition to a management role within the Tech team!

10. Which of Qonto’s 4 values (Ambition, Mastery, Teamwork, Integrity) resonates with you the most and why?

Definitely Teamwork! At first glance, I thought it meant being nice to your colleagues, entertaining a good atmosphere at work, doing team-building activities etc. But then I understood this was “team spirit”, not “teamwork”. At Qonto, we define Teamwork as:

• being conscious of all the inputs you must receive in order to do your work well and who produces them, as well as all the outputs you produce and who receives them,
• collaborate with these other teams or colleagues to define what quality standards and timeframe you expect for your inputs, and what quality standards and timeframe you commit to for your outputs,
• continuously adapt these standards, depending on the shifts of organization and customer demand,

in order to “work together, at the same speed” and ship maximum value to the customer. This may sound a bit technical, but I believe this is really the heart of superior collaboration!

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

To me, what makes Qonto stand out from other companies, and even from other scale-ups, is how much you are challenged and how much “deep thinking” you need to do on a daily basis. Your teammates and your manager simply won’t let you get into autopilot…

If you join Qonto, you must be prepared to regularly hear questions such as: “what are you trying to do?”, “how are you doing it?”, “why are you doing it that way?”, “is it working?”. And those are very tough questions to answer, whatever your job is — engineer, manager, recruiter etc. Those questions are not meant to bring you down, they are meant for you to switch into “deep thinking” mode, make more conscious choices in your work, learn new things and ultimately perform at a higher level than you used to.

It is something I always emphasize when interviewing candidates who want to join Qonto, because those questions require humility and a certain taste for abstract thinking. If you have both and you are qualified for the job, I would say: do apply and join the team! 🛫

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

It’s not really “fun”, but I will certainly remember a shadowing session that we had organized in order for engineers to step into the shoes of a Customer Success officer and answer some real-life customer requests, among the thousands we receive every day. I took on a request submitted by the new CEO of a small company. Her predecessor had left the company on bad terms and hadn’t shared his credentials to access their Qonto account. Therefore they were unable to pay their employees at the end of the month, and the staff was threatening to stop work until they were paid!

That’s when I understood how important it was to have a reactive and reliable customer service when you are in the business of holding other people’s money. Even if they are a business and not an individual… because there are always individuals behind a business 😉