The first thing I noticed when joining Xelix, and what I still say when someone asks what it’s like to work here, is that people are really kind, but also genuinely good at their jobs.

What does a team at Xelix look like?

The people you will spend most of your time with are your squad. The golden trio of a squad lead (a backend/frontend engineer), UX designer, and product manager leads your squad. Each squad has a mix of frontend and backend engineers and an AI engineer liaison. Your squad is in charge of maintaining and adding features to a part of the platform, e.g. Helpdesk, Transactions, and Statements.

You also have a manager, who may or may not be in your squad. You have weekly check-ins and monthly one-on-ones. Their job is really to help you out if anything is blocked and help you own your career growth journey.

How do Xelix engineers work together?

At Xelix, we really want people to collaborate, and part of that is us all coming in once a week. You will find all the squads working together to solve problems, and occasionally someone will overhear a problem and help out because they have faced it before. (I was actually told that when all the engineers are in, we are so chatty we rival the sales team.)

Continuing to learn is always part of an engineering job, and this is no different at Xelix. We have dedicated learning and development time, which can be used in many ways. Some engineers have taken the day to learn a bit more about databases, Django, or design patterns. Others use this time to attend conferences that talk about error reporting, new AI services, AWS, and many other topics.

We also run a fortnightly coffee time where people get to learn something outside of their specific realm. Team members present talks like “What are AI sandboxes?”, “How to panic professionally”, and an “Intro to GraphQL”. A big part of these sessions is giving feedback so the presenter can learn what to improve on for next time. This is a big part of Xelix work culture in general: we try to keep a low-ego culture where everyone feels able to give and receive honest feedback. This helps individuals learn and improve, but also means that, as a team, ideas are critiqued so we can find the best path forward.

At Xelix you are encouraged to put your hand up for stuff you’re curious about — or that you think would make the team’s day-to-day better. We’ve had people get really into AI and help set up skills and workflows that let everyone build faster. Others have brought in new tools that have boosted visibility and security.

But do we get along?

One of the biggest compliments I’ve heard about Xelix socially is that engineers genuinely look forward to our in-office days so they can hang out with colleagues. The engineers manage to take over all the tables (in our building’s shared space), with more pulling up chairs so we can all chat together at lunch. And of course there are always group of engineers who end up at the pub for a couple of pints after work each week.

A couple of times a year we also have squad socials where the squads pick what they want to do. We had a team do an escape room (and no, not everyone successfully escaped), laser tag, and crafting pottery together (some of that was also unsuccessful). As a department, we also try to get everyone together, particularly after our monthly tech updates. The monthly tech update before our Catan social was littered with pieces of advice to win the game, like: you can gain points for long roads, so stock up on the wood and brick. This was definitely one of the best attended socials, and potentially one of our most raptly listened to monthly tech updates.

What about the rest of the company?

As engineers, we do like to keep to ourselves a lot, but we do sometimes venture out to meet people who work in the rest of the company. We have a few company-wide events like our Christmas party and other one-off celebrations (for one celebration, we did all in fact go to the circus). But the main part of the Xelix social calendar is the retreat. For the retreat, the whole company goes off to stay at a hotel for one night. We spend a couple of days playing games and meeting people from all the departments (the engineers do in fact survive this socialising).

Every Thursday some of the boys play football in a competitive league. We also do monthly mixed friendlies for those who really don’t want to accidentally miss a goal and cost AP Milan (yes, that is actually the football teams’ name) some real points.

For the people who aren’t as into running around and prefer other hobbies, we also have a Xelix band. The band is currently unnamed, but some great ideas have been thrown around, like AP/DC (we love our accounts payable puns here) and noise complaint (I am sure this is based on no real events). The Xelix band (which actually has a majority of tech members) practices around twice a month and performed at our charity open mic night a couple weeks ago.

At the end of the day

Engineering at Xelix is really a lot of helping each other to try and do the best job we can.