Backend Engineer onboarding plan

What a strong ramp looks like for a new backend engineer. Week 1 universals + 30/60/90 day milestones, each with an accountable owner — manager, new hire, team, or HR.

Week 1

Get them productive on tools, oriented to people, and clear on what success looks like in their first 90 days.

1. 1Day 1: workspace + tooling set up before they arrive (laptop, accounts, Slack, email). New hire's first email should be 'everything just works.'Manager
2. 2Day 1: 30-min welcome with their manager — share the team's mission, their first project, and book recurring 1:1s.Manager
3. 3Day 1-2: meet & greet calls with 4-6 people they'll work with most. 15-20 min each, calendar-blocked in advance.Manager
4. 4Day 3: have them ship something small (a Slack post, a document, a tiny PR) — confidence-building, momentum-setting.New hire
5. 5Day 5: review the 30/60/90 plan together. New hire confirms it sounds achievable; manager confirms it's the right shape.Manager
6. 6End of Week 1: HR / People check-in. Surface friction (access issues, missing context, mismatched expectations) early.HR

Days 1-30

Local dev env, codebase map, first PR shipped.

1. 1Day 3-5: have local dev running end-to-end. Ship your first PR — a tiny fix, a typo correction, a test added.New hire
2. 2Read the architecture doc. If it doesn't exist or is stale, update it as you read code. Your fresh-eyes view is gold.New hire
3. 3Pair with 3 different engineers in the first 2 weeks. Different problems, different perspectives on the code.New hire
4. 4Take on one well-scoped ticket (2-3 days of work). Get the full lifecycle: review, deploy, monitor.New hire
5. 5Get on-call shadow (no primary on-call yet). Understand what 2am looks like before you sign up for it.New hire

Days 31-60

Own a feature end-to-end. Get comfortable with prod.

1. 1Own one feature end-to-end — spec, design, build, ship, monitor, write the doc.New hire
2. 2Carry first primary on-call rotation. Manager + team available for backup.New hire
3. 3Code-review 8-12 PRs from teammates. Reviewing is how you internalize patterns + standards.New hire
4. 4Investigate one production issue (current or recent). Write the post-mortem if one didn't exist.New hire
5. 5Propose one technical improvement (refactor, test addition, perf optimization). Manager reviews scoping.New hire

Days 61-90

Operate at full output. Spot system-level work.

1. 1Operate at full output. Manager confirms with the team's lead/IC4: you're shipping at the level of an established teammate.Manager
2. 2Lead the design of one non-trivial feature. RFC reviewed by team before build.New hire
3. 3Own one system-level investment (CI improvement, observability gap, dependency upgrade).New hire
4. 4Mentor the next new hire on their first PR. Teaching surfaces what you know that's now tacit.New hire
5. 5Retro: what was confusing about onboarding? Help update the docs/playbooks for next time.New hire

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