3 - Senior Backend Engineer N26 Employee Review

Not innovative, not a technological half-bank with a high turbulence, trying to catch up with the main competitors and industry leaders. Very low level of architecture or almost absent the general architecture vision. IMHO weak CTO and the whole C-level is shuffled quite often. Not high level of engineers. A lot of Jnr and Mid level. Many Seniors are also Mid level for the majority of companies. Not much opportunities to learn and grow technically. Compensation and individual performance motivation is killed by calibration process. If you want to be promoted or get a salary raise, you need to be above expectations or significantly above expectations. For Snr engineers you need to build something unexpected or not planned, which says a lot about the approach to planning and management. ESOPs program is de-facto absent. Bureaucracy, compliance issues and a lot of micromanagement. Every team can do whatever they want with a lot of ad-hoc solutions, negatively impacting many other teams without clear architecture and company standards. Low quality of code. Quality of code, resilience and high-load is sacrificed to deliver faster happy path with tons of tech debt and manual KTBR. 1 year code is already a legacy. Even 1 month code is very often a bad legacy. High attrition of the best engineers, almost nobody to learn from. Race conditions and writing without transactions. Read uncommited level of isolation without locks. Issues with high-load and lack of expertise how to solve it properly. Bugs and manual fixes via SQL queries. Direct access to live data with PII coexists with paranoid GDPR & AML compliance procedures. A lot of buzz words but not really following DDD, hexagonal architecture or other patterns like DRY, SOLID.