Gianluca Rosania & Glovo
Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing Gianluca Rosania, Global Technical Recruitment Lead at Glovo and Co-founder at Livt. With over 10 years of experience in recruitment, his experience is breathtaking to say the least. Curious to know more about his experience hiring with Circular and how the day-to-day looks as a developer at Glovo? Keep reading!
Interviewer: Well, first of all, congratulations on your new hiring! It has been the first time you’ve hired a “Senior Backend Engineer” with Circular. What requirements and expectations were you looking for in order to fulfill this position?
The first experience with Circular was a total success indeed! In Glovo, we look for a candidate whose soft skills are Ownership, Care, Gas, humbleness and good vibes. This should be also combined with software architecture, design and good practices when coding. We include a super fun problem-solving test after a Tech call that lets us show our candidates that human interactions are key, also to see how our amazing candidates solve problems. Oliver Dutta, a developer that we met in Circular, covered all of them and we’re very happy to have him in our team!
Circular is an innovative idea: not only can we hire high quality developers, but it also allows us to help candidates find other jobs when we cannot hire them ourselves. As a recruiter, I have to say that it is beautiful to see that one of the candidates I endorsed for Circular got hired by another company! Also, the user experience is truly good! In only one click, we were able to start a hiring process with Circular. I totally recommend it!
I: We’re very happy to hear that! Thank you very much. Also, having good Candidate Experience along a hiring process helps Developers choose you over others. And I’m aware you did a great job here. But, once the developer joins, what do you do to retain talent? Let’s go through all your perks!
Remote Friendly: we still don’t have the capacity to work fully remote, but we’re very flexible. There is a very positive impact of working together when developers can share challenges with the team, in turn learning and benefiting from it. This works especially well for junior developers: since we have junior, medium and senior profiles, the fact of being at the office will accelerate junior profiles’ learning curve extraordinarily.
Flexible hours: we are flexible. Each person will adapt their schedule to their professional and personal responsibilities.
Projects on the side: “Care” is one of our values. We do “Glovo Care”. This means, we work with several organizations whose mission is helping people in need. One of them is Micracode where our developers go there to give lessons and share their knowledge. We also recycle our bags and provide backpacks to children charities. We do what’s called “Glovers” which consists of delivering orders, each order delivered automatically generating a 15€ donation to specific organizations. We love to share what we do and so we have a blog on Medium where our own engineers write. They love talking about technical challenges we face at Glovo.
Additional training: in Engineering we have access to O’Reilly where you can find thousands of resources in order to bring your knowledge to the next level. Also, we like to set different days to share topics that we like and share them with the rest of the team.
As extra activities we provide language, food and many other classes. As I said at the beginning, we love sharing and another example of it are our many clubs in Slack to talk to colleagues with the same curiosities. There are clubs for meditation, music, yoga, literature, etc. We all have private health insurance with Cigna, covered by the company, and a monthly amount of budget to order Glovo lunches!
Salary review: every quarter we have a performance review based on data. The fact of being data informed will help us make better decisions and know where we can improve.
Equity: we do offer equity to every employee at Glovo!
Financial state of the company: we’ve raised more than 500 million euros and are the 2nd unicorn in Spain. Even though our objective is to continue growing our business, we want to focus, now even more, on our social impact.
Holidays: 23 days a year!
I: And so, for developers that would love to know more about how an engineering team at Glovo works, what would you tell them?
We have adopted a people-driven, autonomous framework for scaling agile while emphasizing the importance of culture and network. This methodology is similar to Spotify with Squads, Clusters, etc – the foundation of which is the Squad, which acts like a Scrum team.
At Glovo, we have 3 sections and the three of them are key.
One is users, divided into 6 different teams: checkout, payments and fraud, customer experience and customer solution, groceries, contact growth and agent efficiency. These are only some of the projects, we never stop! Another section is partners, divided into content and partners, content discovery and content activation and pricing. And couriers, which is the third section. We track and improve the time we take in delivering orders, and forecast how many we’ll be able to deliver in the future. We also have a team called Routing that makes the paths of our couriers in our map using Machine Learning.
For our Backend technology stack, we have: Java 8, Spring, MySQL (Aurora), Redis, AWS (SQS, Kinesis, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda). For Frontend: Vue.js (Nuxt, Vuex, VueRouter), Jest, vue-test-utils, cypress. For Mobile: Java, Kotlin, Swift. And for Machine learning: ML: Tensorflow, LightKBM, Keras, Python.
I: That sounds very challenging! How about a Career path for every member of the team? Is this something that you have implemented?
We are actually looking for Staff Software Engineers in order to establish two different ways of growing. A developer could become an engineering manager and possible director. But if they prefer, they can go for the technical path which means that from senior engineer they could become staff engineer and then principal.
I: Exciting changes coming ahead. What do you do when a developer gets hired and joins the team? How are your onboardings structured in order to offer the person the understanding they need of Glovo?
We do a general onboarding that lasts 3 days. In this time, they are glovers, the way we like to call our riders, and also clients so they can get a better understanding of the product. Then in Engineering there is a continuous learning process. We like to fully focus on the new employees’ needs, therefore, we only set two onboardings per month. This way we ensure that the developer gets a progressive adaptation.
I: I can really see how much you take care of the new hires and how you worry about setting a structure that helps you continue to grow. What leads me to the last question. How has it been growing a Tech team since Glovo’s foundation?
Very challenging! – he says laughing. We grew from 30 to 220 engineers while making sure our company culture stays the same. Also, because of the multicategory of Glovo. We always have to be extremely vigilant to whatever happens around us so that our constitution continues to make sense.
I: A last thing you would like to add….
I love working at Glovo, not only for its culture but also because it has a tremendous social impact.
