What new tech employees can expect from Zalando onboarding

So, you’ve applied for a technical role at Zalando and you’ve just accepted the offer! If you’re wondering what to expect, look no further. We are excited to share a peek behind the scenes, so you can see what awaits you in the first few weeks of this journey, regardless of whether you’re joining in Berlin, Dortmund, Dublin, Hamburg, Helsinki or Lisbon, to make sure you’re well-equipped to dive into life at Zalando.

Part One We designed a special onboarding program for our tech community. The program introduces our new hires to their work environments. This starts with a company-wide onboarding day in which new hires from all across Zalando find out more about Zalando’s history, structure, and strategic future. Zalando started as a very small company in Berlin in 2008, and has now grown to be Europe’s largest online fashion platform with over 15,000 employees. As a new “Zalando,” you’re now an integral part of this journey, and it’s our job to make sure you’re fully equipped to hit the ground running!

Part Two: General Tech Onboarding For most of you, Your second day begins with the Tech Onboarding Program, together with all the other tech newbies. This is taken care of by the Zalando Tech Academy, our internal training centre which caters specifically to tech roles. This is an exciting time, because you get to interact with future colleagues from across the tech spectrum; product managers to UX designers, frontend and backend software engineers, as well as tech management, to get deeper insights into what we do. Early exposure to these different aspects is what makes Zalando Tech such a great place to work.

In this four-day program, a major highlight is a full-day trip to one of our logistics centres near Berlin, where you are able to see how Zalando Logistics operates on the inside, and how we employ technology to improve processes every step of the way. Every one of Zalando’s employees works towards the same goal: to ensure a seamless customer experience, whether you’re working in tech, on the business side, in logistics, or anywhere else. This trip to the warehouse is to provide exposure to even more areas of Zalando’s business; helping our newbies appreciate the work that goes into delivering customer satisfaction at every level.

The tech community is an extremely important aspect of working at Zalando, and one of our main goals from the beginning is to make it easy for you to connect with as many people as possible. That’s why part of your onboarding includes an overview of Zalando’s culture and community. Zalando is home to dozens of “ guilds”; self-organized groups of people who gather to exchange knowledge, share their expertise, or just indulge in things they are passionate about. Our community management team helps manage the guilds and provides the framework necessary for Zalando’s techies to thrive. Especially for newcomers and international employees, this is the perfect opportunity to get involved, and receive recommendations and support.

Part Three: Engineering Bootcamp After covering the basics in the first few days, software engineers embark on a further onboarding program, which dives a bit deeper into the tech environment: Engineering Bootcamp. In this three day program, engineers gain deep insights into our software development lifecycle, covering all the tools and technologies used by Zalando. You’ll be given hands-on exercises on all of our tools, so that you can get to coding and deploying projects as soon as possible.

Topics covered include why we use REST APIs, how we use GitHub Enterprise, how we deploy software using AWS, Stups and Kubernetes, and much more. We also introduce newbies to our “tech radar”: a graphical illustration of which frameworks, infrastructure, data management tools, and languages are in use at Zalando, which are being trialed, and which are on hold and not recommended for new projects.

Our tech onboarding program prepares you for almost any team within the Zalando Tech universe, but of course it’s followed by team-specific onboarding, in which you learn the ins and outs of projects you’re working on and how they fit into Zalando’s strategy.

Whether you’re joining the Zalando team as a software engineer, product manager, UX designer, data scientist, or any other role, we’ve got you covered! At Zalando, we want to ensure that you have the best experience possible when joining the team.

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