At Babbel, our endgame is getting people to have conversations with other people, in a new language. There are fantastic folks here making that possible. In our “Behind The Scenes” series, we sit down with them to provide a glimpse into who makes it all work, what they do, and where their heads are at.
This round we’re talking to Gaelan Taylor, a Backend Software Engineer on the Payment team.
What’s your role in engineering at Babbel? What do you do in a typical day?
My role at Babbel is a Backend Software Engineer. I work on the Payment team, so we handle everything within the payment domain. This includes working with payment providers as well as publishing and processing numerous payment-related events. Lately, I have been working on assisting a teammate with an ElasticSearch integration (ELK stack) to improve the response time of search results needed by our Customer Service department.
Where are you from and when did you move to Berlin?
I am originally from Alberta, Canada and I moved to Berlin around 4 years ago. I miss the mountains and the snow, but also can’t complain with the mild winters we have here.
Which languages do you speak?
Sadly, I only speak English. I have been working on learning German for the past few years, but wouldn’t say I’m a confident speaker yet.
What were you doing before Babbel?
Before Babbel, I was working at another company that had a monolithic Ruby on Rails application.
What drew you to Babbel?
To be honest, I knew someone who worked here and spoke very highly of it. Not only that, it’s a product I used before I came to Germany to try and learn some German before arriving, so I feel it’s interesting to work on a tool that I can also directly benefit from and see the usefulness as a user.
What’s most exciting at the moment?
Currently, the most exciting thing for me is the learning curve. I am most excited to get experience using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of tools and getting more exposure to event-based architectures, which our team relies on heavily.
What’s surprised you most so far?
I would probably say the onboarding experience – it was really well organized! It can be frustrating when it takes a week to get all the accesses you need to work, but I had everything I needed the first day to at least get started. Also, the sheer amount of places to have lunch around the office is staggering.
What do you want to do/accomplish/pursue at Babbel?
I would love to eventually accomplish being a Senior Developer as I grow my skills here. For a more creative goal, I think it would be cool if an idea I had was implemented in the core application, perhaps something developed during one of the annual HackDays.
Want to work with Gaelan? Check out Babbel Engineering positions here!