Aircall

Beatriz Delgado Reimúndez is Engineering Director at Aircall, where she manages two separate teams of engineers. She loves the company’s international working environment, and believes diversity is at the root of innovation. My name is Beatrice Delgado, but everybody calls me Bea. I worked as a developer for the first fourteen years of my career, but in the last eight years I’ve built and led various engineering teams. I started with one and then, little by little, it grew: in my previous company, I ended up managing all the engineering teams, about 60 people in total. I also began hiring the people with the right technical skills and introducing new processes and agile methodologies. Being part of the recruitment process allows you to meet all the people that are joining the team. I really enjoyed that.A supportive employee-centric cultureI have felt really valued since I joined Aircall, and I've received a lot of support from my manager, who is the current VP of engineering. He has helped me understand the technical challenges we face and how to deal with the growth of the engineering areas that I'm managing. We have this strong culture of taking care of our employees. I love that. And we also trust employees to grow their own careers. Whenever a position opens up, we always try to fill it with an internal promotion first before we look elsewhere.&nbsp;The company hired me to help set up a new tech hub here in Madrid. Currently, as engineering director at Aircall, I manage two different aspects of engineering: the first is related to internal tooling, and the other is related to voice AI. Each area has a dedicated team of engineers.Extra layer for scalingBefore at Aircall, engineering managers all reported to one single engineering director. But as we started scaling at a super high speed, hiring a lot of people and creating new teams, we needed to add one more level. In my case, for example, I was managing teams with three totally different scopes. It was very difficult to switch between them without sacrificing some depth and detail, which is why we decided to scale up. The former engineering director is now the VP of engineering, the engineering managers such as myself became engineering directors, and we hired or promoted internal people to become regular managers.&nbsp;We work with agile methodologies following a scrum with sprints of two weeks. That means that the team is very autonomous and can self-organize whichever they want with the product manager. So from the leadership perspective, what I try to do every day is to make sure that we are following the right path regarding their priorities, and that any interaction with the other teams goes smoothly. That means I speak to the engineering managers often. Besides that, I also like to do one on one catch ups with the team leads and provide mentorship regarding their career paths.A launchpad for newcomersOur onboarding programme is called the launchpad. It’s company wide, and provides all newcomers with information regarding our different departments and how they work together. Besides the launchpad, every team has their own onboarding plan. We also offer a variety of courses and presentations focused on transmitting specific technical knowledge. It’s also very common to have a buddy system—someone to help you land on your feet the first three weeks. As for the technical part, you always work in teams of two at the beginning so you’re never left alone. This helps the newcomers learn faster.We are also open to junior career conversion profiles if the candidate has already been trained in the stack that we have, because training them from scratch would simply take too long. For more senior-level candidates, this is less important, because we know they can adapt to new technologies easily. In general, we also look for experience with agile methodologies or scrum. And of course we make sure they are happy to work in an international environment.&nbsp;The root of innovationI think diversity is very good for innovation—for generating new ideas and solving problems in a different way. From a personal point of view, it’s also really nice to share insights on your respective cultures with colleagues. Of course, as a manager, it’s important to try to understand each individual’s needs and concerns, and adapt your management style accordingly. I always try to listen and put myself in the other person’s shoes. When possible, I also like to listen to talks about managing diversity and multicultural teams. I recently read this book called The Culture Map, by Erin Mayer, which provided lots of interesting insights on how to deal with people from different cultural backgrounds.If I had to give advice to younger women in tech, I think it would be to really learn everything there is to know about the specific job. And to have a mentor that can help them to learn how to interact with various stakeholders and support them if they face a discriminatory situation. You need to identify the people that can help you win those kinds of battles, in case they do come up. Every person has their own strengths and weaknesses, so for women I think it’s really important to identify their strengths and develop them to develop their careers.&nbsp;

“We have a culture of taking care of our employees”

Beatriz Delgado Reimúndez