How Verkada Engineers Onboard for Impact from Day One
Nishant Dhanendra
Manager, Engineering Strategy & Operations
At Verkada, we believe exceptional products are built by exceptional engineers. Moreover, becoming truly exceptional, particularly for new hires, requires a deep understanding of our customers, products, and software platform. Verkada University — Verkada Engineering's learning and development initiative — aims to deliver this understanding through two in-depth training programs: Verkada University Product Proven (VUPP) and Verkada University Software Sessions (VUSS). These programs equip new hires with the knowledge, skills, and customer context needed for immediate and long-term impact — not as onboarding checklists, but as experiences designed to spark curiosity, build customer empathy, and help engineers hit the ground running.
Verkada University Product Proven (VUPP): Building Customer Empathy Through Hands-On Experience
VUPP is an immersive, hands-on program designed to give new hires a deeper understanding of our products. While it began as a software engineer-focused training, it has grown to support multiple teams at Verkada, including Hardware, Product, Marketing, Design, and Legal.
New hires participate in small-group sessions led by our Solutions Engineers, who bring real-world product insights and customer perspectives from the field. Over seven hours spread across three days, participants install and configure one product from each of Verkada’s product lines — cameras, access control, air-quality sensors, alarms, workplace, and intercoms. They troubleshoot connectivity challenges, install real-world hardware setups, and navigate end-to-end software workflows on our cloud-based Command platform, mirroring how customers use our products.
VUPP is more than just a hands-on demo from our product experts. It is an immersive training that replicates the customer experience and often surfaces unexpected insights about our out-of-the-box setup, packaging, and overall user experience.
“By day two, I was mounting hardware, testing configurations, and experimenting with features like our customers would. That level of immersion gave me so much context I didn’t even know I was missing”, said Christopher Arjune, an Engineer on our Device Security team.
Through this training, teammates return to their teams with a stronger grasp of:
How our products are designed for simplicity: from quick hardware setups to an intuitive interface that scales with ease across customer sites.
How our hybrid cloud platform works: serving enterprise needs via on-device and cloud storage, integrating our products on a single platform.
Where can we innovate further: ideas to make our products more powerful through new features, smoother UX, or smarter AI-powered workflows.
Verkada University Software Sessions (VUSS): Helping New Engineers Understand How We Build at Verkada
VUSS complements VUPP’s focus on customer empathy by laying the technical groundwork for how we build at Verkada. VUSS introduces new software engineers to our architecture, development methodologies, and the principles behind them. This is done through a blend of self-paced interactive modules and in-person sessions led by experienced senior engineers, and frequently, one of our co-founders, Benjamin Bercovitz.
The contents span three areas:
Core Engineering Practices: our development philosophy, architecture, CI/CD pipeline, testing strategy, and code review approach.
Domain-Specific Knowledge: tailored content based on an engineer’s expertise (i.e., frontend, backend, or firmware engineers).
Engineering Culture: our collaborative approach, decision-making processes, and commitment to maintaining code quality while moving fast.
These foundations make VUSS a launchpad for continuous learning and long-term growth. They give engineers a clear, in-depth, and structured understanding of our proprietary tools, codebase, and tech stack, helping them ramp up quickly and start adding value with confidence. The content encourages self-directed exploration and also connects new hires with mentors and teammates by helping them ask the right questions in the right places. Many engineers continue referring to VUSS content well beyond onboarding.
In the words of Geet Duggal, an Engineering Manager on our Cameras team, “After five months of being here, I still refer to onboarding documents and diagrams regularly and would not be surprised if they are also useful to veteran engineers. There was clearly a lot of love put into them, and it shows.”
Programs That Grow With Verkada
In 2022, with an engineering team and product footprint less than half its current size, our onboarding consisted of simple presentations scheduled as needed, all built around one clear goal: to give software hires the best technical onboarding possible.
Three years later, Verkada University serves 300+ engineers while staying true to that same goal. As we’ve expanded our product suite, scaled our codebase, and shipped features powering millions of devices worldwide, our onboarding has evolved too, shaped by participant feedback and a deep understanding of the context and tooling new hires need to ramp up confidently.
Gallup reports that only 12% of U.S. employees “strongly agree” that their company does a great job of onboarding [1]. At Verkada, VUPP holds a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 54, and VUSS is at 56 — both above the 40-point NPS benchmark, placing them in the “excellent” range for participant satisfaction. These numbers have steadily climbed — nearly one point per new-hire cohort — reaffirming the impact of the experience we’ve built.
More Than Just Onboarding
Together, VUPP and VUSS do more than help engineers ramp up; they lay the foundation for our engineering culture — one that values ownership, teamwork, customer empathy, and craft [2]. Through this investment in onboarding, we’re reinforcing how we build, collaborate, and grow as a team that builds exceptional products.
