Starting my career at Wolt — meet HyeSoo from Engineering

If you hear someone mentioning Wolt, you probably think of food and grocery delivery first. But behind the scenes we have a team of over 5000 people who work hard to make Wolt great for our customers and partners across 23 countries. 🌍 Wolt is not only a delivery app for restaurant food, groceries and other items. We’re a technology company building a logistics platform. In practice this means building a broad range of technologies that work seamlessly together to provide a world-class experience for our customers and partners, as well as our internal teams.

Wolt’s over 35 product teams include hundreds of talented engineers, designers, data scientists, product leads and more. Our product teams are based at our tech hubs in Helsinki HQ and Berlin, while we also have some team members working remotely across Finland, Germany, Estonia and Sweden, too. Every year, we welcome interns to join our teams to play an important part in making Wolt better for our customers, partners and internal teams.

Interns at Wolt get to dive deep into how we build products at Wolt. Interns are warmly welcomed to actively take part in the “behind the scenes” action of making software that millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of partners use on a daily basis. As an intern, you’ll be a member of one of our 35+ product teams, learning and working side-by-side with our engineers, designers, product leads and more. We’re proud that most of our interns get an offer to join us full-time after their internship. Our internship program is like a springboard to join Wolt permanently. 🚀

In this blog we’ll hear from HyeSoo who joined Wolt as an intern almost two years ago, and ended up with a permanent role in the Courier Onboarding team. In the summer of 2020 HyeSoo joined our Courier Onboarding Team which focuses on the experience of new Wolt courier partners. In short, the team covers the courier partner’s journey with Wolt – all the way from first joining Wolt as a courier partner, through the onboarding process and getting their gear all the way to off-boarding if a courier decides to part ways with Wolt. In a nutshell, the team works on making the courier partners’ journey with Wolt as smooth and enjoyable as possible.

Let’s hear more from HyeSoo:

How did you join Wolt at our HQ in Finland? 🇫🇮

I moved over from Korea to Finland back in 2014. I had a Bachelor’s degree in Law and was reflecting on my career, asking myself “what do I really enjoy doing?”. I realized I wanted to challenge myself to learn something different and more visual, which eventually led me into web development. I kicked off IT studies at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and through my studies and work experience, I got interested in building applications to solve real life customer problems.

I came across the Wolt internship opportunity online near the time of my graduation. When I was doing my research, Wolt really seemed like a workplace with a great culture and strong focus on creating a world-class customer experience. So I thought I’d learn a lot here and I have to say I wasn’t wrong!

What did you work on during the internship?

I never really felt like I’d be ‘just an intern’ in any way. From the beginning I was involved in our team’s projects and I worked closely with my team. In the beginning it took some time to learn what’s happening at Wolt — what our teams do, the tech we use and understand where I fit in and how I can help out. As I learned more I got onto bigger tasks and projects.

My team’s projects have covered various aspects of helping us to improve our courier partners’ and operational team’s experiences with Wolt. One of my projects was around improving the way our courier partners give feedback and comments to our operational team. It’s important that our operational team thoroughly understands what’s working well and what we could do to improve courier partners’ experience with Wolt. So we provided a list of tags for our Operations team to analyse, with the goal to understand how we can improve. In this particular project I participated in team discussions and helped to improve our internal “Opstool” that we use.

We have over a hundred thousand courier partners who deliver on Wolt. Our Opstools are used by many internal teams to support couriers and operations. So, it always feels very fulfilling and impactful to deliver features and services for courier partners and operational teams as it impacts so many people. 🚀

What does the day-to-day look like for a software engineering intern?

Usually my day starts with going through yesterday’s work or discussions or doing code reviews. My team has a 15 minute standup meeting every morning, where we go through what each of us did the day before, any blockers we’re facing and what we’re going to focus on today. We have meetings to cover various team projects and often continue to have further discussions on Slack. Team discussions play a really important role to find our goals and the directions for our work. For the rest of the day, I focus on coding. At Wolt we work with an MVP first mindset, meaning we launch a feature, gather data and always look to improve and iterate the features based on data and customer feedback.

Throughout my internship, my mentor and team have always been very supportive. Whether it’s about specific work tasks, practices our team uses or just finding direction on something, I’ve always felt I can ask questions and will be helped out. This made me feel very supported and I have lots of appreciation for my mentor, team and other co-workers.

What have been the biggest learnings in your journey at Wolt?

Overall, I’ve learned so much about teamwork here. I’ve worked closely with engineers, designers, product leads and team leads. We work in an agile manner, in sprints. Together as a team we build our roadmap based on company visions and customer needs. We derive detailed plans to decide what we work on upcoming sprints. After each sprint we do a retro, where we review how things went and what the next steps should be. Being involved and working together as a team throughout the whole end-to-end process has taught me a lot.

How about the biggest learnings from a technical viewpoint?

While working with inspiring colleagues at Wolt, I’ve learned lots of good practices and interesting technologies. If I had to pick one, it’d be developing curiosity and asking good questions about how to develop maintainable software together. We’re growing really fast, so also our systems are scaling quickly. We always aim to write code in a clean, understandable manner so that not only ourselves, but all our developers can understand it easily.

I’ve also learned the importance of writing tests. This has helped me define problems to solve through new features, and provided confidence on implementing features or refactoring. In our development cycle, team collaboration and interaction play a big role. We’re involved with the end-to-end development process — from analysis to deployment. But we don’t have to do things alone — our developers give constructive feedback to each other on Pull Requests and via various channels. The feedback culture, active collaboration and transparency have taught me a lot as you see the reasoning behind technical decisions we make.

Any tips for those thinking of applying for the internship?

When I was applying for the internship, I felt a bit nervous and wasn’t sure if I’d get the role. I got a lot of feedback throughout the process, and it really showed in the interview process that teams at Wolt appreciate open feedback and willingness to learn.

My tip would be to come to the process with an open mind — be ready to receive feedback and show your curiosity to learn by asking questions in the interviews. We don’t expect you to know everything, but it’s important to have an open mind and willingness to learn. 💙