Day in the Life: Being a Twilio API Software Engineer

Day in the Life: Being a Twilio API Software Engineer

Guillaume Binet is the Lead Engineer on the API Team at Twilio, and will gladly talk to you about team building, API maintenance, his pilot’s license, or his love of scuba diving. We kept the conversation to his day-to-day life at Twilio.

How did you end up here at Twilio?

I was working in Europe in the same field. One day I wondered in which companies I would go if I wanted to continue in the same field and it was not a difficult choice : I sent only one résumé out.

What’s a typical work day look like for an engineer at Twilio?

The mornings are usually clear of meetings so it is a good opportunity to advance on your individual tasks mainly coding and code reviews. Then we have a standup meeting where we coordinate the team and put the product manager up to speed on our progress. The afternoon is usually more interactive either with the team for deployments, some pair programming sessions, brainstorms, meetings with various parties depending on your workstream.

How does the API engineering team’s work differ from Voice or Messaging?

The API team has a more transversal focus with topics like usability of our API, consistency, security, … Also, we act like a hub in the company as different teams need to interact with us to present their features/enhancements on the public API.

What are some ideal skills and traits for someone interested in working with the Twilio API Engineering team?

By nature, the team has to deal with a wide range of challenges on a very large range of technologies so being open minded about technologies and a good team player is paramount. Twilio also has a great culture for empowering its engineers so you should not be afraid to have more responsibilities right of the start compared to other structures. For example you will be responsible of your projects from inception to production.

What is the most challenging part of your job? And what it the most rewarding?

The company is organized in “organic” teams, it can be scary to be at the intersection of those in the API team but you realize quickly that as everybody adhere to the same values you can make things happen very fast.
And this is the aspect I like the most about this job : you can make a difference.

Why should someone be an engineer at Twilio?

The telecommunication world is full of nonsense but at Twilio we are changing that and fast. Being an actor of this tidal wave is just awesome.

Click here to apply for the position of Twilio API Software Engineer