[2/2] Interview: How is your future job at SensioLabs like?

How does remote work at SensioLabs?

Anais: Basically, it depends on where you live.

SensioLabs has two physical offices in France: one in Asnières-sur-Seine, near Paris, and another one in Lille. If you live near Paris or Lille, you will have two days per week at the office and three days from home. If you live elsewhere in France, we are open to full remote work. It has worked at SensioLabs for many years, even before Covid: now we are used to working remotely, and people don’t feel alone at home.

SensioLabs organizes two in-person “team building” events each year to strengthen the cohesion of our team. At these events, we can meet and greet newcomers and staff members we already know. Our last team building took place last March at SymfonyLive Paris.

Léna: Absolutely! A lot of time is devoted to conversations within the tech team. For example, the tech “apéro” happens once a week. The technical team connects to share about their projects, talk about technical challenges, and see if someone else can provide a solution. The “midi-formations” (French for “lunch and learn”) take place regularly to show a technical topic for 30-40 min and learn all together.

You can also always count on your colleagues at SensioLabs to answer you quickly on the dedicated Slack channel.

Starting in 2023, we have a chart that clearly defines remote work and provides financial compensation.

Are there accommodations for candidates with disabilities for each job at SensioLabs?

Léna: Yes, we have adapted our workspaces for people with disabilities. SensioLabs offers optimal working conditions to its whole team, even if you have a disability. We are always ready to adapt and improve. Our positions are, of course, open to applicants with disabilities.

What are the typical missions of a job at SensioLabs?

Anais: When you join SensioLabs, you go through an incubation period of about two weeks.

As the creator of Symfony, SensioLabs mainly deals with development projects in the Build phase. The developers’ missions are web development “from scratch”, one-shot or progressive migrations to Symfony, version upgrades, creation of new features, etc.

Our experts work on the whole life cycle of an application. It is a varied job, from project design to the Run phase. For example, the experts conduct architecture workshops, quality, performance, security audits, and application certifications. From time to time, they also deliver training sessions.

Léna: To give an idea of the missions, I can share real-life examples. We recently had a developer who progressively migrated a Zend-based application to Symfony to modernize it. Another developer is involved in creating “from scratch” an internal Web tool based on communication with an official API.

It is very diverse: our top goal is to push you forward with each new project and to make you a certified expert on Symfony.

How would you describe life at SensioLabs?

Anaïs: People are always energetic at SensioLabs, and we love to get together in a friendly atmosphere. For example, at our last team building during Symfony Live 2023, we played laser tag. We had a great time!

Léna: Yes, I agree. I also think it is a chance to work in a team of passionate people. You can feel the passion for Symfony, PHP, and web development within the team. It is communicative and encourages you to give the best of yourself. I find that there is good team spirit at SensioLabs. People are caring and humble: there is no negative judgment if someone asks questions or asks for help. Obviously, we hire people who know Symfony well, but you can never know everything, and Symfony evolves quickly. SensioLabs promotes the sharing of knowledge and best practices within the teams. And everyone can contribute with their own good ideas.