Senior Software Engineer Onboarding Plan — Acme Inc.

Pre-Day 1 Checklist

Access and Accounts

• Provision Acme email, calendar, and employee directory profile.
• Enable SSO and multi-factor authentication.
• Grant access to:
  • Source control and relevant repositories
  • Issue tracking and project-management tools
  • Documentation and knowledge bases
  • Team chat and engineering channels
  • CI/CD pipelines and deployment dashboards
  • Cloud environments and infrastructure tooling
  • Logging, monitoring, and incident-management systems
  • Development, staging, and approved production environments
• Add the engineer to relevant teams, mailing lists, and on-call groups.
• Confirm least-privilege permissions and the process for requesting elevated access.

Equipment and Development Environment

• Ship and configure laptop, monitors, security key, and peripherals.
• Install required security, VPN, endpoint-management, and development software.
• Provide local environment setup instructions and repository bootstrapping scripts.
• Verify that the engineer can build, test, and run a representative service locally.

Context and Logistics

• Share the first-week calendar and onboarding guide.
• Assign an onboarding buddy and technical mentor.
• Provide:
  • Product overview
  • Architecture diagrams
  • Engineering principles and coding standards
  • Team roadmap and current priorities
  • Release, incident-response, and on-call documentation
  • Glossary of company and domain terminology
• Identify a small, low-risk early-win task.

Week 1: Orientation, Meetings, and Shadowing

Key Meetings

• Manager kickoff: Role expectations, responsibilities, success measures, and 30/60/90-day plan.
• Team introduction: Roles, ownership boundaries, collaboration norms, and communication preferences.
• Product overview: Customers, business model, key workflows, roadmap, and success metrics.
• Architecture walkthrough: Major systems, data flows