From Startup to Scale Up: How to Scale Engineering teams

Transitioning engineering teams from a start-up mentality to scaling it into a larger company takes intentionality and strategy. When teams are small, design decisions can be made over a coffee and deployments can be done at will. As teams grow in size, communication and strategy on scaling the teams becomes of utmost importance. When we have hundreds of developers who are working across dozens of functional teams, what are the areas for which we should implement checks and balances to ensure quality & efficiency isn't compromised?

Growing a global engineering team takes a great balance between productivity, efficiency, and adding layers of processes to keep all systems functioning and all engineers informed about architecture and design changes. But not everyone understands the importance of these, especially the ones who are coming in from startup's and are used to work at a certain pace without following lot of formal processes.

Over my career I have worked on both ends of the spectrum, for the initial phase I was in a start-up. I still remember code reviews used to happen by sitting next to each other and there were no formal processes for any the areas mentioned above. Moving to my current role was quite a shift. When I joined them, I used to wonder why we have so many processes in place. But now I understand and agree that all of that is necessary.

In this talk, I will cover my experiences around

- Reviews (design & code)

- Code Styling

- Automation Testing

- Performance & Reliability

- Schema Change & Data migrations

- Release Cycles

- Application Security