Onboarding as a Senior Engineer

Posted on April 30, 2024 • 3 min read • 616 words

This suggested 30/60/90 day engineering onboarding plan is designed to ensure your successful transition as a new team member. Getting connected, delivering consistently and getting involved to best contribute to the company's goals.

Overview  

In the first 30 days, the focus is on getting connected with people and systems. By day 60, you should be delivering consistently and continue your learning. By day 90, you are fully integrated into the team and independently handle your workload and possibly support your more junior teammates, while also looking for ways to improve processes and contribute to the company’s goals.

Some ground rules  

Always ask lots of questions, find something new to learn, connect with people.

Make suggestions after you have listened and learned the context.

If you find that you have completed your initial goals ahead of schedule, you can always move forward with subsequent goals or parts of them.

Alignment between engineer and manager through proactive communication and clear expectation setting is crucial, as details are contextual and often change.

Towards Day 30: Get connected  

• “buddy-up” (your main point of contact to navigate your new environment)
• setup your local environment (IDE, tools, etc.)
• connect to all systems (HR, CI, etc.)
• complete any required training (e.g. reading employee handbook, regulatory requirements)
• learn the software development process
• participate in the process (ex, if it’s Agile: Story time, planning meeting, retro, etc.)
• ship your first contribution
• complete a code review for someone else
• complete a pair programming session
• complete at least 5 x 1:1s with team members
• contribute to the documentation based on your learnings
• have a check-in with your manager to assess progress and confirm 60 days goals

Towards Day 60: Deliver value consistently  

• ship consistently, deliver what you commit to
• enrich/fix the documentation
• continue with any required training
• learn about the product’s architecture and technical vision
• learn about the product roadmap, understand current and future use cases
• Help structure the work: break down stories, task the stories out, etc.
• run some part of the process (ex, a release, an Agile ceremony, etc.)
• suggest an improvement or experiment for your team’s process: highlight the problem, How does your solution benefit the team? the org? the company?
• complete at least 5 x 1:1s with team members and members of other teams (e.g. Infra team, Ops, other adjacent product teams)
• have a check-in with your manager to assess progress and confirm 90 days goals

Towards Day 90 and onward: Get involved  

• Learn something new about the business
• Get involved in the product discussion, suggest an improvement that would benefit users
• Participate in guilds or other community of expertise: attend + deliver 1 item of value for the group (e.g. organize a presentation of a technology or process that is familiar to you and relevant)
• learn about another component of the tech stack (e.g. CI-CD pipeline, Infrastructure, Testing framework), offer your assistance (e.g. be an ambassador, point of contact)
• Find a mentor: e.g. a more experience engineer in the organization, someone working on a topic that interests you.
• Mentor a Junior developer.
• suggest an improvement or experiment for the engineering organization: highlight the problem, How does your solution benefit the teams? the org? the company?
• complete at least 5 x 1:1s with folks across the organization (commercial team, support, client services)
• Identify and connect with the stakeholders of some of the projects you are involved with
• have a check-in with your manager to assess progress and discuss your goals/milestones for the next quarter and your career evolution

Closing thoughts  

As you onboard, you are absorbing the culture of your new team and organization through engaging with an open mind and creating many relationships. Those relationships are very important and will form the bedrock to support your impact in the future. Through continued learning and contribution, you will build upon this foundation, deliver value and grow your sphere of influence.