How are career development opportunities at Aiven?

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

Great people, great compensation, a lot of opportunities to learn new skills

As a tech scale-up, it can be a challenging environment to work in as the pace can be demanding at times.

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.

Prior to 2023: Career progression prospects, fantastic culture, great pay, great work-life balance. Post 2023: Pay.

Started off being the best company I worked for when I joined back in 2021. January 2023 when they laid off 20% of the company is when things went downhill. Turned into a corporate hell, with unrealistic sales expectations and an extremely toxic and unhealthy culture and work environment. Didn't know a single person who was happy there. The only reason this review is a 2/5, is because the company was a 5/5 prior to the layoffs. It's a shame that they decided to flush the culture down the drain and turn into a soul-less corporate machine.

Used to be good, and they have a nice crab logo. Once a year you get to travel to Europe for a company gathering, and kickoff, but that's about it.

- There is no actual career progression, and they keep pinning the excuse to a lack of job architecture, when this has been the same reason for the past 1.5 years. - No increment in the last performance evaluation, unless you are promoted (then I don't get it, why do performance evaluation in the first place). HR cannot be trusted, and they gaslight you with some corporate narrative. - They restructured quietly recently with in the people and sales team, and were not open about certain layoffs until being questioned during AMA, and could see the people who were impacted being hurt. Some of these people were really good performers and people. Some of the leads and managers (some have no experience managing a team before) left behind do a lot of boot licking, and sometimes claim the credit of the hardwork of the people on the ground. - Which brings the next point, do not trust what they say. One of the executives last year said they will do a layoff once, because they do not want to do it again. They ended up repeating it this year, and there is no credibility in them. - Hired a lot of new people (whom all care about getting into the good books of management, but do not care about their team), but ended up laying off people who knows the product and work inside out. End up also having a slowdown in hiring and to some extent hiring freeze. Get your act together man. Why hire when you are going to fire? - A lot of fake people as a consequence, because they just want to cover up for themselves, and end up focusing more on that rather than delivering actual work and solving real problems. - Some really good people have left the company on their own, and I am genuinely worried and concerned about the future of the company.

I recently joined Aiven in a marketing leadership position. If you’re looking for a bias for action, fast paced, high growth environment this is it. After a period of transition over the last 18 months, the vision and direction is very clear. There is a real fail fast, learn, and innovate mentality here. No idea is considered a bad one if it helps us scale. Specifically in marketing, the growth opportunity is massive. There are tons of new roles opening up. It’s a culture of openness where you’re encouraged to move fast and take ownership.

Like any company that has restructured or shifted focus there have been some growing pains. However, the current stability and support system make the tough times feel firmly in the rearview mirror.

- Some really great smart people to be worked with - Decent benefits - Flexible work schedule - Good Salary

- Constantly changing strategy, and missing targets because of it. Big push to switch to "Enterprise," when the product/company is not ready. - They preach values of openness, but the management teams are not transparent and don't listen to employee feedback - RTO policy - The job I was sold in the interview process was not the reality when I started - No ability for career progression in the foreseeable future.

- Lots of growth opportunities while working with brilliant engineers - Recent focus on developer experience making life a lot better - Great compensation and benefits - Opportunities for opensource contributions - Work life balance is systematically encouraged - Yearly offsites to Europe to meet remote coworkers

- Past two years have been tough for the company and industry as a whole, causing a lot of redirection and reprioritization that makes employees feel nervous.

- Generous learning budget - Supportive colleagues - Flexible work schedule

- Lack of a defined career progression - Unequal salaries, even for the same role

- Salary is above average, especially for new joiners - The product is really amazing, you will learn a lot - Open source friendly - Flexible time - They provide stock options. - Direct mangers do care about you. Directors and above might not

- Salary for new joiners is greater than for who ever is already working there - Used to be flexible around remote working, now it requires you to leave within commute distance for their office - All the business is centred mainly in Europe. If you are not in Europe you are expected to work extra hard just to keep up with domain knowledge from an expanding list of products - Be ready for a change in company policy without communication. One day it might be you are not allowed to get your phone after 2y, the other day, hires will only happened on a city X, the other they will change how much you earn during on-call, the other they say they will support your relocation than drag the process for MANY months then only offer job on a really weird city, the other they might remove your access for some random reason while you are on vacation without a clear policy on how to get it back - A lot of really good talents are leaving the company, it's a terrible sign - Communication is laughable. Don't expect to have things well documented, caos when trying to find any sort of documentation, you will find loads of out-of-date articles, and policies that are not in use - Not a clear career opportunity. Unless you are working in Kafka, you are less likely to get promoted. They tried setting up a job band and framework, but you can see the people who got promoted did not fit all criteria there - You can only exercise part of the stock options on some rounds with weird conditions. It might change when they do the IPO