What is the salary like at Aiven?

Good salary and team is awesome

Turbulent external market has lead to team turmoil

Prior to 2023: Career progression prospects, fantastic culture, great pay, great work-life balance. Post 2023: Pay.

Started off being the best company I worked for when I joined back in 2021. January 2023 when they laid off 20% of the company is when things went downhill. Turned into a corporate hell, with unrealistic sales expectations and an extremely toxic and unhealthy culture and work environment. Didn't know a single person who was happy there. The only reason this review is a 2/5, is because the company was a 5/5 prior to the layoffs. It's a shame that they decided to flush the culture down the drain and turn into a soul-less corporate machine.

Above market salary for US employees, yearly company retreat in Europe, ability to grow quickly in a fast-paced environment

Layoffs happen frequently, turnover rate is abysmal. Boys club. Beware. Barely any diversity/support for women trying to grow in their career. Corporate politics.

Competitive salary and share plan options at the time of joining.

- Huge lack of structure. - Very high turnover, people constantly coming and going. - Leadership is disorganised and often “lost in translation.” - Poor atmosphere, not supportive. - Recruitment and onboarding were a disaster: disorganised, unclear, and full of red flags. Unfortunately, these issues reflect deeper systemic problems in how the company operates.

Decent salary, good international travel opportunities, interesting and kind colleagues

Executive leadership has no vision or appetite to stick to a plan. Despite hiring many people with the experience and skillset to win, leadership routinely ignores advice from within the house, over-commits to half-baked plans, assigns the wrong people to tasks, and then is unwilling to take accountability for continuously failing to deliver anything new.

good salary and remote work

- management not transparent on how company is performing. and suddenly boom people got laid off - CEO doesn't have the experience to run a company and lack of direction - product not ready for enterprise market - support respond was a mess

Flexible working, good salaries, and some very smart people. A focus on work/life balance and some good benefits. The offices if you're near them are very pleasant and easy to work in. A good culture of calling out hard work in some teams. An off-site which is well managed. Opportunities for progression, especially in engineering.

There's an episode of the Simpsons where homer walks into a group of engineers and goes "are you working hard?.... Could work any harder?" And the engineers just start pressing buttons more quickly This is how the executive team at aiven see workers. Their logic is that everyone should be a 10x engineer so why hire more? Well a scrappy start up isn't the same as a large global organisation with multi million contracts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that simply cannot be tackled because of massive firefighting, every day. Missold accounts, poor user experiences. The refusal to add capacity means competitors are overtaking aiven rapidly but culturally this problem is only recognised in a few areas. Very good people also leave, they are frustrated by Byzantine hr processes which aim to curtail pay. The cost of replacing these individuals is greater than the cost of a small pay rise. Ultimately sales will continue to stagnate until aiven accepts it cannot be run on a shoestring. Open source is less of a value proposition than it was 5 years ago. If you want large enterprises be mindful of what they really need and don't be thrifty.

Flexible working, good salaries, and some very smart people. A focus on work/life balance and some good benefits. The offices if you're near them are very pleasant and easy to work in. A good culture of calling out hard work in some teams. An off-site which is well managed. Opportunities for progression, especially in engineering.

There's an episode of the Simpsons where homer walks into a group of engineers and goes "are you working hard?.... Could work any harder?" And the engineers just start pressing buttons more quickly This is how the executive team at aiven see workers. Their logic is that everyone should be a 10x engineer so why hire more? Well a scrappy start up isn't the same as a large global organisation with multi million contracts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that simply cannot be tackled because of massive firefighting, every day. Missold accounts, poor user experiences. The refusal to add capacity means competitors are overtaking aiven rapidly but culturally this problem is only recognised in a few areas. Very good people also leave, they are frustrated by Byzantine hr processes which aim to curtail pay. The cost of replacing these individuals is greater than the cost of a small pay rise. Ultimately sales will continue to stagnate until aiven accepts it cannot be run on a shoestring. Open source is less of a value proposition than it was 5 years ago. If you want large enterprises be mindful of what they really need and don't be thrifty.

- The salaries used to be nice, but the salary bands were lowered in early 2025. - The benefits are ok, probably similar to most Berlin companies. - The people are nice, like in most companies. - Generally no toxicity (talking about the Product/Engineering department). - Good work/life balance.

It's a very disjointed company with a management problem. Leadership suffers from an identified lack of trust. They are quite disconnected from the ground. They announce their strategy with marketing-sounding sentences to the rest of the workforce, who has a very different perspective about what we're asked to deliver so morale is not good. Reorgs, large or small happen every few months. They do not necessarily involve layoffs. It seems like Management doesn't really know what to do with the company. The idea is to throw darts at the board, and see which darts hit bullseye and capitalize. This might be fun for you if you are a tinkerer and like greenfield projects, and don't mind seeing them die. Otherwise, this might just be tiring and demotivating, which is generally the vibe in a lot of teams. Finally, the biggest problem is the level of communication skills. At many, many levels of the business, communication is incredibly poor. It's hard to get information, people decide what's important to know for you, or your questions/feedback just get ignored. This doesn't happen to manipulate, it's just that management doesn't seem to understand how to empathise and build trust. Upward feedback doesn't seem go up that much.

The benefits and salaries can be enticing along with the company trip to Spain or Portugal

There’s a gross lack of direction within in the company. The plan of execution changes every 3 months and they do yearly “restructures” to accommodate these plans. Leadership is stubborn and close minded. Changes take way too to be implemented and executed and then the concept of a plan changes again.