What are perks and other benefits like at Aiven?

Few years ago used to have fun culture, good benefits across markets and also talented people. But unfortunately this is in the past. So, folks who scored contracts before 2022 would still list those as benefits.

It took me a long time to put a finger on what is exactly wrong with this company. I'd say, Aiven surely struggles like any growth company who accepted a huge investment. The financial projection was way off charts and actual growth doesn't match the promised number. Investors get nervous, board is unhappy. This creates panic and tension in the C-level and afterwards all cascades down into complete chaos to the lower levels. This is my guess ofc, because I can't explain the chaos otherwise. Chaos looks like unbalanced workloads, some teams are burning out, others -- severely underutilized, contradicting requirements in product, overly optimistic sales targets, systematic internal mess with processes, unhappy colleagues across all departments complaining non-stop. This drains the energy dramatically. There was no clear guidance from upper managers who oftentimes didn't contribute at all and were just sitting on their hands. Tbh I never really understood why Aiven created an army of managers, directors and execs. This is a highly corporate vertical structure that is not needed in the 400ppl company. It would take you in some cases 5-6 levels of approvals for certain things, just ridiculous waste of time. Some of the most talented and loyal folks actually left, or worse - were laid off. Some of the most toxic and inefficient guys would be still there. So go figure who is responsible to keep talent. It definitely broke my professional heart to see folks who would really care about Aiven leaving. Many of those were actually women recently. As of now, majority of the leadership at Aiven are middle aged white males. Tells you something about the vibe.

Working at the company has been a very positive experience so far. The environment provides great opportunities to learn and grow while tackling real technical challenges related to cloud infrastructure and open-source technologies. The culture is friendly and supportive, with colleagues always willing to help. There is a strong focus on collaboration, and employees get exposure to a wide range of technologies, which helps improve problem-solving and technical skills. The workplace is international and inclusive, and the benefits offered are also good.

- Fast-paced environment may feel overwhelming at times, especially during peak workloads. - Learning curve can be steep when working with a wide range of technologies.

- The salaries used to be nice, but the salary bands were lowered in early 2025. - The benefits are ok, probably similar to most Berlin companies. - The people are nice, like in most companies. - Generally no toxicity (talking about the Product/Engineering department). - Good work/life balance.

It's a very disjointed company with a management problem. Leadership suffers from an identified lack of trust. They are quite disconnected from the ground. They announce their strategy with marketing-sounding sentences to the rest of the workforce, who has a very different perspective about what we're asked to deliver so morale is not good. Reorgs, large or small happen every few months. They do not necessarily involve layoffs. It seems like Management doesn't really know what to do with the company. The idea is to throw darts at the board, and see which darts hit bullseye and capitalize. This might be fun for you if you are a tinkerer and like greenfield projects, and don't mind seeing them die. Otherwise, this might just be tiring and demotivating, which is generally the vibe in a lot of teams. Finally, the biggest problem is the level of communication skills. At many, many levels of the business, communication is incredibly poor. It's hard to get information, people decide what's important to know for you, or your questions/feedback just get ignored. This doesn't happen to manipulate, it's just that management doesn't seem to understand how to empathise and build trust. Upward feedback doesn't seem go up that much.

A lot of opportunities to learn and grow, good benefits, amazing leadership, employees are very nice and friendly. It's the best team I've worked with.

I don't think of any to be honest

The benefits and salaries can be enticing along with the company trip to Spain or Portugal

There’s a gross lack of direction within in the company. The plan of execution changes every 3 months and they do yearly “restructures” to accommodate these plans. Leadership is stubborn and close minded. Changes take way too to be implemented and executed and then the concept of a plan changes again.

Great management and higher management! Very supportive environment with great benefits.

Laid off organization after the SDR team had their best quarter in years. The handle by the org was not professional and very chaotic.

Open source is a core part of the DNA of the company, and there is investment in keeping open source viable.

Massive number of changes and churn across the company, mostly due to lack of alignment between the leadership at the company. This results in missed opportunities, investing in the wrong things, and a lot of waste in doing things that do not impact customers or the bottom line. Remote-friendly was a thing, but no longer. Expect to be an outcast as a remote employee. Once again, due to the management team changing all the time, this could keep flip-flopping. Poor benefits for most employees, significantly worse than other startups.

Many talented and nice people, focus on open-source, interesting scalability and reliability challenges, opportunities to build some really interesting tech. Good benefits overall.

- Most components are home-built, steep learning curve, long onboarding time for the new devs. - Shifting priorities and vision, re-orgs is the ongoing theme. - Lack of people to reliably solve engineering problems. Many teams are overwhelmed and under constant pressure. Top people are leaving. - The whole engineering team can be fully laid off, including manager, just one week after delivering a big and strategic project. - Growth opportunities are fairly limited. - Salary bands were lowered in the beginning of 2025. Salaries are not competitive in some locations.

- nice culture - annual offsite - lots of learning

little benefits compared to market RTO enforcement

Flexible working, good salaries, and some very smart people. A focus on work/life balance and some good benefits. The offices if you're near them are very pleasant and easy to work in. A good culture of calling out hard work in some teams. An off-site which is well managed. Opportunities for progression, especially in engineering.

There's an episode of the Simpsons where homer walks into a group of engineers and goes "are you working hard?.... Could work any harder?" And the engineers just start pressing buttons more quickly This is how the executive team at aiven see workers. Their logic is that everyone should be a 10x engineer so why hire more? Well a scrappy start up isn't the same as a large global organisation with multi million contracts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that simply cannot be tackled because of massive firefighting, every day. Missold accounts, poor user experiences. The refusal to add capacity means competitors are overtaking aiven rapidly but culturally this problem is only recognised in a few areas. Very good people also leave, they are frustrated by Byzantine hr processes which aim to curtail pay. The cost of replacing these individuals is greater than the cost of a small pay rise. Ultimately sales will continue to stagnate until aiven accepts it cannot be run on a shoestring. Open source is less of a value proposition than it was 5 years ago. If you want large enterprises be mindful of what they really need and don't be thrifty.