How to Apply to Extia

Extia is a French independent IT and engineering consulting firm, known in the French market as an ESN (Entreprise de Services du Numérique, the contemporary term that replaced SSII around 2013 under the industry association Numeum, formerly Syntec Numérique). The company was founded in 2007 in Paris by Emmanuel Jaffré and his co-founders, and has grown organically into one of the mid-sized independent players in the crowded French consulting market, with a consulting base commonly reported in the 3,000 to 4,000 range across France and its international offices. The headquarters sits in the Paris-La Défense business district, in the Puteaux area on the western edge of Paris, close to the historic concentration of French banking, insurance, and large-corporate clients that anchor the ESN industry. Extia operates from more than twenty agencies across France, including Lyon, Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Lille, Rennes, Aix-en-Provence, Nice, Sophia Antipolis, Rouen, and Grenoble, as well as international offices in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. The company is private and not publicly listed, which is a distinguishing feature in a French ESN market that increasingly includes listed giants such as Capgemini, Sopra Steria, Alten, and Devoteam, and post-transaction holdings such as Akka Technologies inside Adecco and AUSY inside Randstad. Independence and co-founder leadership continuity are central to how Extia is positioned culturally and commercially. Emmanuel Jaffré has served as Président/CEO since the founding of the company and continues to lead it. His tenure is unusually long by French ESN standards, where executive rotation through private-equity-backed or listed holding structures is common, and it is closely associated with the people-centric ethos that Extia markets under the banner of Culture Happy at Work. Candidates should always verify the current leadership composition on extia.fr before interviews, because operating committee, regional agency manager, and practice lead appointments do rotate over time, but the founder-led character of the company has been stable since 2007. Extia's business mix is typical of a broad-based French IT and engineering ESN, delivered primarily through two commercial models that every candidate should understand before interviewing. The first is régie, a French time-and-materials model in which a consultant is placed at a client site and billed for the days worked, with the client directing day-to-day technical priorities within the scope of the mission. The second is forfait, a fixed-price project model in which Extia takes delivery responsibility for an agreed scope, price, and timeline, typically with a mix of on-site and nearshore or remote work. Many consultants experience a blend of régie and forfait missions over a career, with régie dominant at the junior and confirmé levels and forfait more prevalent at senior architect and manager de mission levels. Between missions, consultants enter intercontract, a period during which they remain on CDI (French permanent-contract) salary while the sales and resource teams place them on the next mission; intercontract time is sometimes used for certification, internal R&D through Extia Labs, or internal delivery work, and it is a well-known feature of the ESN model that candidates should understand clearly before joining. The service catalogue spans a broad IT and engineering footprint. Software development work covers Java (Spring, Spring Boot, microservices), .NET (C#, ASP.NET Core), Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Angular, Vue, and full-stack profiles. DevOps and platform engineering cover Jenkins, GitLab CI, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and Ansible. Cloud practices cover AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, with Azure particularly strong given the weight of Microsoft technology in French banking, insurance, and public-sector clients. Data engineering and data science practices cover Snowflake, Databricks, Kafka, Spark, Airflow, and the standard Python data-science toolchain, and a growing AI and machine-learning practice covers LLM integration, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, and Anthropic Claude deployments for French enterprise customers. Cybersecurity, systems architecture, SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft Power Platform, Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, embedded systems, and telecommunications and network engineering round out the catalogue. A dedicated Extia Engineering segment addresses R&D, industrial, and embedded engineering for aerospace, automotive, and telecommunications customers, competing with Alten, the former Akka Technologies, and Expleo in that specialized market. Extia's sector coverage reads like a catalogue of French and European blue-chip employers. Banking and insurance is the largest vertical, with exposure to BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, BPCE, Crédit Mutuel, AXA, Allianz France, and broader Paris-market financial services. Retail coverage includes groups such as Carrefour, Auchan, and LVMH. Telecommunications work runs through Orange, Bouygues Telecom, Free (Iliad), and SFR. Energy and utilities exposure includes EDF, Engie, and TotalEnergies. Industrial clients include Airbus, Safran, Thales, Stellantis, Renault, and Faurecia, clustered regionally around Toulouse for aerospace, around Paris and the Lyon area for automotive, and around the Grenoble and Sophia Antipolis technology clusters for telecommunications and semiconductors. Public-sector engagements include the Ministère de l'Économie et des Finances and its agencies, SNCF, RATP, and La Poste. Healthcare and life-sciences work includes Sanofi, Servier, and Ipsen, as well as French hospital systems and public-health bodies. Media and transport round out the mix. Extia's peer set inside France is well-defined and candidates will hear about it repeatedly during interviews and early tenure. At the top of the market, Capgemini is the largest French ESN with a global footprint and a publicly listed parent. Atos has gone through a multi-year restructuring since 2023 and remains an important peer despite its turbulence. Sopra Steria is another large listed player. Alten is a specialist in engineering and R&D consulting. Akka Technologies is now part of Adecco. Devoteam is strong in cloud and consulting. Talan, Amaris Consulting, Wavestone (management consulting), CGI France (Canadian parent), Accenture France (US-based global), Inetum, and specialists such as Aubay, Neurones, and Kereon round out the competitive field. The former AUSY now sits inside Randstad. Understanding this market lets a candidate speak credibly about why Extia, rather than a listed giant or a private-equity-backed roll-up, is the right career choice for them. Cultural positioning is central to Extia's market identity. The company has been recognized as a Great Place to Work in France and in Europe across multiple years, and its Culture Happy at Work program is more than marketing; it is a concrete set of practices that include annual internal events, community-focused initiatives, structured work-life-balance commitments, inclusion and diversity programs, the Extia Foundation (its corporate-social-responsibility arm), and a deliberate investment in internal talent managers whose day job is to follow each consultant's career, well-being, and mission trajectory. Attrition is generally reported to be lower than at the largest listed ESN peers, and candidates who value a more human and community-oriented French consulting environment consistently rate Extia highly on Glassdoor France, Welcome to the Jungle, and Great Place to Work rankings. At the same time, prospective consultants should enter clear-eyed about the realities of the ESN model: client-site work, billing pressure, the intercontract cycle, and the need to maintain technical relevance through certifications and internal training are all features of the industry, not specific to Extia, and a candidate's personal tolerance for those features matters more than any marketing narrative. Under French labour law, Extia is subject to the Convention Collective Syntec (IDCC 1486), the dominant collective bargaining agreement in the French IT services and consulting sector, which sets pay grids, notice periods, working time arrangements, and career coefficients across the industry. A CSE (Comité Social et Économique) represents employees in the larger French perimeter, as required by the 2017 ordonnances Macron. The dominant contract type is CDI (contrat à durée indéterminée, the French permanent contract), with effectively no use of CDD (fixed-term) or intérim for consultants in the Extia model. The standard working-time arrangement is built on forfait jours or a 39-hour effective week compensated by RTT days, with 25 statutory paid vacation days plus typical RTT accruals; a 13th-month salary component is common and consistent with Syntec practice, and CE-branded employee benefits (tickets restaurant or Swile, mutuelle, prévoyance, and similar) round out the French benefits landscape. Internal mobility is a deliberate feature of the career model, with Extia Career Tour programs that facilitate intra-France transfers and international moves toward Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Spain, and other markets where Extia has agency presence. The 2025 market context is AI-heavy, with Extia investing in an internal generative-AI practice, prompt-engineering enablement, and integration work on Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT for French enterprise clients, while cybersecurity and cloud continue to anchor the largest share of mission revenue.