1.Senior engineer joining a payments team
When it fits: Use this when you are an experienced individual contributor in a system that moves money, and the real risk is changing something before you understand why it works the way it does.
30-60-90 day plan: Nadia Petrov, Senior Backend Engineer (Payments)
Start date: 2026-11-02 Manager: Chris Albano Reviews: day 30 2026-12-01, day 60 2026-12-30, day 90 2027-01-29 Related: [[Nadia Petrov]], [[Payments team]]
What success looks like at day 90
- Chris: "She can be primary on-call for payouts without paging anyone, and she owns the refund retry rewrite."
Days 1 to 30: learn
Focus: Understand how money moves through the system before changing any of it.
Learning goals
- Trace one payout end to end, from API call to bank file, and write it up as a diagram note @done(2026-11-12)
- Read the last six payout incident post-mortems @done(2026-11-19)
People to meet
- Dev Malhotra, previous refunds owner: why the retry logic waits 24 hours
- Kwame Asante, SRE: what a 3 a.m. payout page actually involves
- Marisol Vega, finance ops: which failures cost her team the most hours
Early win
- Fix the stale currency-code lookup (PAY-1182) through the full deploy pipeline @done(2026-11-24)
Day 30 review (2026-12-01)
- Done: payout trace, post-mortems, PAY-1182 shipped.
- Not done, and why: Marisol meeting moved to Dec 3 because of her month-end close.
- What changed in the plan: Chris wanted me on the on-call rota by day 45. Agreed instead: shadow two shifts in December, primary from 2027-01-11.
Days 31 to 60: contribute
Focus: Own one meaningful change and learn on-call by shadowing.
Performance goals
- Refund retry design doc approved by Dev and Kwame @due(2026-12-18)
- Shadow on-call in the weeks of Dec 7 and Dec 14
Work I own end to end
- Refund retry rewrite, including the migration plan @due(2027-01-22)
Days 61 to 90: lead
Focus: Ship the rewrite behind a flag and take primary on-call.
Goals
- Rewrite live for 10 percent of refunds with no increase in failed payouts @due(2027-01-22)
- Primary on-call, week of 2027-01-11
Proposal
- Recommend whether finance ops gets a self-serve retry button. Marisol's team spends about 6 hours a week on manual retries. @due(2027-01-27)
Support I need
- Production read access (requested Nov 2, Chris chasing IT)
- One hour a week with Kwame until my first on-call shift