Meet Patrick, Head of R&D Lab
CircleCI France
Tech team
The tech team is an innovation team in the heart of the engineering department. This means that they must be ambitious with their approach to new problems and they must find solutions that have never been invented before.
In order to do this they are mixing software engineering and machine learning skills, more particularly AI on code. The ever expanding field of artificial intelligence continuously creates new opportunities and new challenges for the Developer Experience team. They are trying to entertain practices that make the team happy: agile organization, right to make mistakes through small iterations and short user feedback loops. They are the first users of the tools they develop and consequently everybody in the team, from senior engineer to intern, is an active stakeholder to the product strategy.
Key numbers
11
commits/day
Expertises breakdown
Engineering
55%
Product
13%
Data Science
33%
Technologies and tools
Node.js
100%Go
70%ExpressJS
25%PostgreSQL
20%OpenAPI
10%FastAPI
10%MongoDB
5%Kotlin
5%Java
5%React JS
100%TypeScriptFrontend & Backend
95%JavaScript
5%GitHub
100%Docker
100%Azure
100%Azure Devops
30%
Backend
Frontend
Devops
Go ⚙️
CircleCI has engaged into a total migration of its codebase from Clojure to Go which means that as a member of the Developer Experience team you’ll have to grow a solid mastery of the language.
CircleCI & Github ⚙️
Continuous integration and continuous deployment is what CircleCI do. Have you already optimized a pipeline? Do you know how to deploy your code seamlessly through these tools?
Jira Confluence ⚙️
The ultimate combo is part of the Developer Experience life, your experience with these tools will make a difference to make you an active and successful member of the team.
Organization and methodologies
The Developer Experience team is very agile, it tries to maintain start up flexibility against the rigidity of the scale up world. They have a few rituals to make sure that everybody is aligned and on track. They keep at heart that the goal of any ritual is to ultimately enable as much focus time and empowerment as possible for every member of the team. No pointless meetings.
Here’s some of the rituals they have
- Demo Time. Every Monday morning they check the exciting achievements of the team in real-time
- DX Inspiration. Once a week a member of the team volunteers to present a topic and foster creativity and share knowledge with the team.
- Daily stand up. The classic agile stand up
- Chapter Syncs. The team is currently split between a dev chapter and an AI chapter. Each gathers to take technical decisions about the codebase, follow-up innovation and drive quality decisions.
- Share & Care. An informal meeting to create inclusion and maintain the transparency and spirit of the team.
Projects and tech challenges
Our work is currently split into 2 product streams. On the one hand we are working on local validation. This new terminology was born from the belief that in the continuity of the shift left movement - aiming at bringing some tasks of the software development lifecycle to earlier stages in order to reduce cost, toll and task shifting - the validation step of software development was largely slow and unoptimized which forced developers to lose constant focus. Since 2022 we have been working on empowering the developer on performing integration and deployment more efficiently without leaving their local environment. The official CircleCI VS Code Extension will be released in the fall 2022 and they are waiting for new team members to pitch them what the next game-changing feature that belongs in it should be.
On the other hand they are working on helping developers test more quickly and more efficiently than they do now. This is a 3 years process already; it all started with Ponicode, a french startup doing AI on code to accelerate unit testing for Javascript and Typescript since 2019. The startup was acquired by CircleCI in March 2022 (most of the CircleCI team members are previous Ponicode team members) and they have moved forward with their plan to accelerate and simplify unit testing. Identifying what takes more time and what generates the biggest difficulties in the testing process and then finding practical solutions to bring to the developers in the IDE is what you’ll be working on if you join the team.
Recruitment process
During the recruitment process they have technical project involved.
- Screening session with a CircleCI internal recruiter
- 2 steps technical test (depending on the position applied for)
- Face to face with Baptiste, R&D Lab Engineering Manager
- Face to face with Benedetta, R&D Lab Product Manager
- Face to face with Alex, Product Marketing Manager
- Informal meet with the DevEx Team
Latest job posts
No openings for now, please check back in a few days!