Meet Mira: What it’s like to be an associate engineer

Mira Vogt, associate full stack engineer on the Product Optimization team gets candid about what she loves about work and how she connects with her team from remote.

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Mira Vogt is an associate full stack engineer on the Product Optimization team. She tells us about the ins and outs of her role, the exciting projects that she works on, and what kind of learning and development opportunities are available to her. The associate engineer gets candid about what she loves about work and how she connects with her team from remote.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I joined half a year ago after completing a coding boot camp last autumn. Before that, I worked in several other roles, starting my career as a business lawyer. I’m currently part of the Product Optimization team.

Our primary mission is to constantly improve the pages customers see when they come to your websites, such as our homepage or location-specific pages like city and country. What impressed me about the company was its strong core values and focus on growth. And who wouldn’t want to help people enjoy their travels and enable them to get to know other cultures?

Can you tell us a bit about your role as an associate engineer?

As an associate engineer, the main expectation is to learn how to be autonomous and improve our skills. I’ve been involved in many projects from the beginning, working on features independently or with support. I enable my team to iterate our pages faster and to improve the overall customer experience.

If you’re starting a career in a field as complex as software engineering, it’s easy to never feel ready to apply for a job and start working.

But in fact, you’ll make progress fast on the job with input from very experienced engineers around you. So don’t hesitate to apply because of the fear of not yet being good enough.

On the Product Optimization team, we run many A/B experiments on layout improvements, for example, to find better ways of communicating the value we bring to our customers. As we work by the SCRUM methodology, all projects are split into small, quickly achievable tasks, which we plan on a bi-weekly basis together as a team and then work on according to their priority.

On a typical day, we have a short standup to update the team on our current tasks and start working autonomously on whatever needs to be done. Besides the work within the team, we attend cross-team meetings to share learnings and collaborate on broader initiatives.

What kind of learning and development opportunities are available to you as an associate engineer?

We receive a learning budget to attend conferences or purchase resources on topics we want to deepen our knowledge. What’s more important, though, is the overall culture of learning and passing knowledge. All colleagues are open to taking time and explaining things to me, be it theoretical concepts or practical implementation.

Pairing sessions, where you work together on a problem, are highly encouraged and especially useful in remote working times. The expectations on personal development are very clearly communicated. There is frequent in-depth feedback from your manager and peers, making it easy to identify areas to develop further.

You might also be interested in: What are productivity pairing days?

What do you enjoy about work?

What I love about engineering is the “riddle-solving” nature of it. Even though all tasks are described precisely, and it’s clear what to do, there is room to decide how the implementation will look, what approach to take, and how to achieve it.

It can be tricky and frustrating, but in the end, you’ll figure it out, either by yourself or with some support, and you will have learned something new in the process. Besides the technical aspect, what makes work enjoyable is the people around. Even though I haven’t met many of my colleagues in real life, they are friendly, very diverse, and open, which makes collaboration and meetings a lot of fun.

How was your experience joining the team from remote?

The first few weeks were tough, as it was my first time working remotely and the first time working as an engineer, so I was overwhelmed by every aspect of work being different from what I knew before. Luckily I received a very clear onboarding strategy and was assigned a buddy who I could go to with any questions.

What I love about engineering is the “riddle-solving” nature of it. Even though all tasks are described precisely, and it’s clear what to do, there is room to decide how the implementation will look, what approach to take, and how to achieve it.

This was especially important as requesting a Zoom meeting for clarifying a problem felt a lot more annoying than just catching somebody between meetings in the office. But like everybody else, I got used to it quite fast and lost the anxiety of contacting people via Slack or Zoom. However, I’m still looking forward to seeing some friendly faces outside of my laptop screen in the future.

How do you connect with your team remotely?

As weather and restrictions ease up, I’ve finally managed to meet colleagues in the office or for a walk.

Do you have any advice for an aspiring associate engineer who would like to join our company?

If you’re starting a career in a field as complex as software engineering, it’s easy to never feel ready to apply for a job and start working. But in fact, you will make progress fast on the job with input from very experienced engineers around you. So don’t hesitate to apply because of the fear of not yet being good enough.

A lot of it is about a learning and growth mindset, which is best demonstrated by showcasing your past achievements and being aware of the areas you still need to improve. Practice telling your story, how you got here, what you learned along the way, what you want to achieve in the future and how you plan to get there. And when in doubt, contact somebody who is already working in the same position via LinkedIn. Most people will be happy to help and answer any questions you might have.

For updates on our open positions check out our Career page.