In September 2019 we opened our doors to a group of grads who’ve each been taking on an 18-month engineering programme, supported by an experienced mentor. We caught up with four of them to find out how life at Trainline is treating them so far, and what they’ve been working on.

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‍Veronika

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How was your first rotation?

My first rotation was in Fusion Fares. The team is a backend team and works on the UK search results and provides all the reference data for upstream services.

This was a huge challenge for me at first as I'd never worked on backend before. I definitely learnt a lot about the technologies we use for our backend services and even got a chance to use my experience as a frontend engineer to create a small debugging tool for the team.

What has been your Trainline highlight so far? 

It is really hard to pinpoint one single highlight of my time at Trainline so far. But if I need to pick one I’d say our team event when our colleagues from Poland and India came to visit the London office. It was a great chance to get to know everyone a little better, have a nice dinner and some drinks and show off our very mediocre minigolf skills! 

What has surprised you most about working at Trainline? 

Coming from Germany, where we only have one train operator, it still amazes me how complex the UK rail system is.

What's your second rotation focused on and how are you finding it so far? 

My second rotation is in Tango where I'm working on the DWeb booking flow. I only had the chance to physically meet the team briefly before we moved to working from home, but I'm really enjoy working with them and learning a lot. I love working on frontend and user-facing tasks.

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Nassim

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‍How was your first rotation?

I really enjoyed my time in Hydra where I focused on our Contact Centre, working on both the frontend and backend. A couple of projects that have stood out for me include allowing our customers to change the collection card they use to pick up tickets and also helping to implement the functionality to handle Split Tickets on the Contact Centre.

What has been your Trainline highlight so far? 

I've had lots of great moments at Trainline in the last eight months. Some that come to the top of my mind are the various Christmas events held around the office, hosting the weekly wins (shout out the Weekly Wins team!) and the summer meet up 🎉.

What has surprised you most about working at Trainline? 

When I started I was worried about the level of help I'd receive as most of the tech I've been working with I had no prior exposure to. But the team and the people surrounding me have been extremely helpful and have taken the time to teach me which i'm very thankful for! 

What's your second rotation focused on and how are you finding it so far? ​​​​​​​

I enjoyed my time so much at Hydra that I decided I wanted to stay here for my second rotation as it gives me exposure to both the languages I want to improve on - c# and JavaScript. Some future work I am excited about is Railcards, Transaction Summary and the deprecation of Tracs 🙏.

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‍Dan

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‍How’s your time at Trainline been so far? 

Great! I’ve been working on creating reports to visualise our AWS spend and find areas we can save money, including helping create a new process for working with teams to streamline their AWS usage. So far, using this process we’ve helped the Database team lower their costs by 26% a week! 

What has been your Trainline highlight?

The AWS Scaledown for COVID. It was amazing to see everyone pull together to bring Trainline’s spend down without affecting the user experience for our customers. Thank you again for everyone’s help! 

What has surprised you most about working at Trainline?  

The opportunities for learning. It’s great that I can take some time to focus on learning new skills. At the moment I’m working on an AWS assistant solutions architect certification to increase my knowledge of AWS. 

What’s your focus for the next few months? 

More savings! I’ll be working with clusters to help find ways they can save money in AWS, as well as creating visualisations they can use to get the most out of their AWS usage

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Kwabena

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‍How was your first rotation?

My first rotation was in DietCode’s e-commerce team and it was a great experience as I got to work on the tools and services used to process and fulfil orders made by our customers. 

What has been your Trainline highlight so far?  

There hasn’t been a boring moment during my time at Trainline so far! A recent highlight of mine was migrating many of Vulcan's applications to Fast AMIs, making the overall experience better for the developers. It was a great opportunity to learn more about DevOps and work with the wider team to achieve this great milestone 

What has surprised you most about working at Trainline?  

The many opportunities there are to get involved in things, both within our day-to-day teams (like bi-weekly brown-bag sessions to show off our work) and the wider company (such as the Trainline Quiz nights and our Meetup events).

What's your second rotation focused on?

My second rotation is in the Vulcan Core team, working on Trainline’s Headless Content Management System (CMS) application. It’s going really well so far, especially since the Headless CMS application went live a few weeks ago with very little trouble! 😊