Ahmed El Sayed, Vodafone’s Global Digital Engineering Director & UK Chief Information Officer, explains how Vodafone is becoming an exciting place to work for ambitious software engineers looking to create the digital products and services of the future.
Vodafone is changing. We’re becoming a technology communications company. But what does that really mean?
We are adding to our existing commercial partnerships with a “build over buy” approach, whereby we develop more of our own digital products and services in-house. This will give us more control and help us respond to the needs of our customers more quickly and effectively.
So we’re on a Europe-wide drive to hire 7,000 new software engineers by 2025 to complement our 9,000 talented Vodafone engineers and help us achieve this exciting transformation.
Our software engineering teams will work in various value streams to build and scale global products around Internet of Things (IoT), home security, financial technology, connectivity and many more areas to come. These products will be built on the latest engineering principles and technologies, supported by a modular and cloud-native architecture.
Our developers will write code that gets used by millions of customers around the world
Our philosophy is ‘build once, deploy many’ and we’ve created platforms, such as our Source Web Components Library, that encourage global knowledge-sharing and enable our engineers to reuse and develop existing code.
Our cloud platform enables us to create environments where we can deploy and test our products in public and private clouds in a fully automated way. This accelerates speed of delivery and enhances customer value.
And it also means our developers will write code that gets used by millions of customers around the world!
Our engineers work across a range of technologies – including React Native, Java, C# and Python – and are involved in the evolution of our DevOps culture, CI/CD [Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery] pipelines, chaos engineering practices, and cloud practices.
This is why we’re scouring Europe for the best talent and have created an awesome technical career path, with Vodafone evolving fast into an engineering employer brand. We’re also at the early stages of creating our own in-house retraining scheme, so we can “grow our own” engineers.
In addition to this, we’ve also launched our own apprenticeships programme in partnership with Multiverse, the professional apprenticeships start-up. Under this new scheme, recruits, including school leavers, will be able to train to become a junior software engineer within 15 months, reaching Level 4. They kick off with an intensive three-month “boot camp” as an alternative to college or corporate training. And Vodafone will continue to support those who choose to continue their studies to earn a degree qualification with a top-up to Level 6.
If the pilot apprenticeship scheme works well, I can see us expanding it across our European markets to help us build up our software engineering expertise.
Our message to software engineers everywhere is: “Come and join us and help build an exciting digital future!”
The Multiverse Apprenticeship programme begins on 20 September 2022 and applications for 2023 will open in November.
For more information visit Apprenticeships | Vodafone.co.uk.
