How to Apply to Iliad Group (Free)

14 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 1 open positions

Key Takeaways

  • Iliad Group is privately held and Xavier-Niel-controlled since the 2021 to 2022 delisting; there is no public stock and no employee equity plan, only cash and bonus.
  • The legal employer matters: confirm whether the role is at Free, Free Mobile, Free Pro, Iliad Italia, Play, Eir, Scaleway, Iliad Datacenter, or Free Senegal before investing in the application.
  • The Iliad France ATS is a custom in-house platform on a French HR stack; subsidiaries run their own portals, none of which share data with each other.
  • Apply in the language of the posting. French is mandatory for most Free / Iliad France roles; Scaleway runs largely in English; Italian, Polish, and Irish English apply for the corresponding subsidiaries.
  • Scaleway is a real European cloud competing against AWS, Azure, GCP, and OVHcloud; engineering interviews probe production trade-offs, not puzzles.
  • Culture is challenger, technical, anti-establishment, and direct; expect to defend specific numbers on your CV in interview.
  • Negotiate cash levers (base, bonus, signing) and local benefits; there are no RSUs and no public-market liquidity event to wait for.

About Iliad Group (Free)

Iliad SA is a French telecommunications, cloud, and datacenter group headquartered at 16 Rue de la Ville l'Eveque in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The group employs roughly 17,000 people across France, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Senegal, and operates one of the most aggressive low-price challenger strategies in European telecom. CEO Thomas Reynaud has led the operating group since 2018, but the strategic center of gravity has always been founder, Chairman, and dominant shareholder Xavier Niel, the French billionaire who built Free out of a Minitel-era startup in the early 1990s and has run it as a personal disruption project ever since. Iliad was publicly listed on Euronext Paris from 2004 until 2021. That year, Niel launched a tender offer through his holding vehicle HoldCo II to take Iliad private, completing the buyout for roughly EUR 3 billion and finishing a full delisting in 2022. Today the company is privately held by Niel (approximately 75 percent) with a minority stake retained by other family interests. Practically, this means there is no public stock for employees to buy, no quarterly earnings call cadence to plan around, and no ISS-style governance pressure on the board. Compensation is cash and bonus, not RSUs. Decisions can be made faster than at a listed peer, but they are also made by a much smaller group of people, with Niel as the final word on anything strategic. The brand portfolio is the easiest way to understand what Iliad actually does. Free (free.fr) is the original French fixed-line and broadband disruptor, launched commercially in 2002 with the Freebox, and now serves more than 14 million subscribers across mobile and fixed in France. Free Mobile entered the French mobile market in January 2012 with a EUR 19.99 unlimited plan and a EUR 2 entry plan, collapsing pricing for Orange, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom essentially overnight. Iliad Italia launched in 2018 with the same playbook against TIM, Vodafone Italia, and Wind Tre, and now claims more than 10 million Italian mobile subscribers. Play (Play Polska, P4) was acquired in 2020 from Novator and Tollerton for roughly EUR 2.2 billion enterprise value and is now Poland's largest mobile operator with around 13 million subscribers. Iliad also holds a controlling stake in Eir, the former Irish state telecom, picked up in 2018 from Anchorage Capital and partners. Free Senegal is the renamed Tigo Senegal mobile operator. Scaleway is the group's cloud arm, originally founded in 1999 as a hosting company and repositioned in the 2010s as a European public-cloud competitor to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, with a sovereign-cloud and EU data-residency story. Free Pro handles the B2B telecom segment, and the group operates Iliad Datacenter facilities in France that anchor both Free's network and Scaleway's footprint. A few things outside the operating perimeter still shape the experience of working there. Xavier Niel funds Ecole 42, the tuition-free coding school in Paris that has expanded globally, and Station F, the Paris startup campus. He runs Kima Ventures as a personal seed investor, and he holds significant stakes in Le Monde and La Provence. He is married to Delphine Arnault of LVMH. None of these are formally part of Iliad Group, but they sit inside the same orbit, and they color the culture: technical, anti-establishment, design-conscious, and openly proud of being French. The near-term picture is consolidation. Iliad has been in on-and-off discussions with Vodafone about combining Iliad Italia with Vodafone Italia, a deal that would reshape the Italian market and is still in flux as of 2025. The French market is under perennial four-to-three merger speculation as Altice France and Bouygues Telecom navigate their own balance-sheet pressures. Polish Play continues to invest in 5G and fiber. Eir is rolling out fiber and 5G across Ireland. Scaleway is making a European sovereign-cloud pitch into a market dominated by US hyperscalers, with OVHcloud as its larger French competitor. None of this is guaranteed to land the way the company is positioning it. If you are joining Iliad expecting a stable, listed-incumbent career path, you will be disappointed. If you are joining because you want to work inside one of the most aggressive challenger operators in European telecom, with a clear founder voice and a real engineering culture, the fit can be excellent.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Decide which entity you are actually applying to

    Decide which entity you are actually applying to. Iliad Group is a holding structure; the day-to-day employer is one of Free, Free Mobile, Free Pro, Iliad Italia, Play (P4 sp. z o.o.), Eir, Free Senegal, Scaleway, or Iliad Datacenter. The contract you sign, the labor law that applies, the language of work, and the hiring manager all depend on which entity owns the role. Read the posting carefully and confirm the legal employer before investing time in a long application.

  2. 2
    Start at the right careers portal

    Start at the right careers portal. The Free and Iliad France hub is recrutement.iliad.fr (also linked from free.fr). Scaleway posts at scaleway.com/en/jobs and runs its own pipeline. Iliad Italia posts at iliad.it/lavora-con-noi. Play recruits at play.pl/kariera. Eir uses careers.eir.ie. Free Senegal posts on free.sn and on local Senegalese job boards. Applying through a third-party aggregator is fine for discovery, but always confirm the role is still open on the official portal before submitting.

  3. 3
    Expect a custom French in-house applicant tracking system on the Iliad and Free

    Expect a custom French in-house applicant tracking system on the Iliad and Free side, not Workday or Greenhouse. The Iliad recruitment platform is a proprietary tool (built around a Talentsoft-style French HR stack) with French-language forms, French date formats, and a CV upload that parses but does not always preserve formatting. Build your CV in plain text-friendly PDF, not in a heavily designed two-column template, and confirm the parsed fields by hand.

  4. 4
    Match the language of the posting exactly

    Match the language of the posting exactly. Roles based in France default to French, even for engineering positions; Scaleway often runs in English because the team is international, but Free, Free Pro, Free Mobile, and Iliad Datacenter France will expect a French CV and a French cover letter. Iliad Italia expects Italian. Play expects Polish, with English acceptable for senior and engineering roles. Eir expects English. Free Senegal expects French (with Wolof useful for retail and customer-facing work).

  5. 5
    Write a real cover letter for French-perimeter roles

    Write a real cover letter for French-perimeter roles. The lettre de motivation is still a meaningful artifact in French hiring, more so than in the US or UK. One page, addressed to the recruiting manager if possible, explaining specifically why you want this entity, this team, and this role, ideally with a concrete reference to an Iliad product or recent announcement. Generic letters are filtered out fast.

  6. 6
    Prepare for a multi-stage interview loop with both HR and operational managers

    Prepare for a multi-stage interview loop with both HR and operational managers. Typical pattern: a 30-minute screening call with a recruiter, followed by one or two technical or functional interviews with the hiring manager and team, often followed by a final interview with a director or, for senior roles inside Free France, a member of the executive committee. Scaleway adds a coding exercise or system design round for engineering roles. Iliad Italia and Play follow the same general structure in local language.

  7. 7
    For Scaleway technical roles, expect open-source-aware engineering interviews

    For Scaleway technical roles, expect open-source-aware engineering interviews. Scaleway runs a real cloud platform, contributes to open-source projects, and hires engineers who understand Linux, Kubernetes, networking, observability, and distributed systems. The technical loop will probe system design, on-call posture, and pragmatic trade-offs, not LeetCode trivia. Bring concrete examples of services you have run in production.

  8. 8
    For retail and customer-facing roles at Free Center stores, expect an in-store a

    For retail and customer-facing roles at Free Center stores, expect an in-store assessment. Free Center sales advisors and store managers go through a practical assessment, often including a role-play with a simulated customer, in addition to standard HR interviews. Hours are retail hours including Saturdays, and the legal framework is the French Convention Collective des Telecommunications.

  9. 9
    Negotiate cash, not equity

    Negotiate cash, not equity. Iliad has been delisted since 2022. There is no employee stock option plan equivalent to a US tech listing. Negotiation levers are base salary, variable (bonus or commission), thirteenth-month payments where customary, meal vouchers (titres-restaurant) in France, transport reimbursement, and for senior hires sometimes a signing bonus. Do not expect RSUs and do not expect liquidity.

  10. 10
    Plan around French labor law if your contract is in France

    Plan around French labor law if your contract is in France. Standard offers include a CDI (contrat a duree indeterminee, permanent) or CDD (fixed-term) under French law, with statutory paid leave (five weeks plus RTT in many cases), mandatory profit-sharing (participation et interessement) where applicable, and a mutuelle (private complementary health insurance). Trial periods (periode d'essai) are usually two to four months and renewable once. Polish, Italian, Irish, and Senegalese contracts follow local law, which differs materially.


Resume Tips for Iliad Group (Free)

recommended

Tailor the CV to the entity, not just to Iliad Group

Tailor the CV to the entity, not just to Iliad Group. A CV pitched at Free France should foreground French-market telecom, French regulatory awareness (Arcep, CNIL), and Free product knowledge. A CV for Scaleway should foreground cloud-native stack, infrastructure-as-code, and open-source contributions. A CV for Play should foreground Polish-market mobile and CEE telecom context. Do not send the same generic file to all of them.

recommended

Use the European one-to-two-page CV format, not the US one-pager dogma

Use the European one-to-two-page CV format, not the US one-pager dogma. French, Italian, Polish, and Irish recruiters all accept two pages for candidates with more than three to five years of experience. Photo is optional in France (and increasingly avoided to reduce bias claims), still common in Italy and Poland, optional in Ireland. Date of birth is optional and increasingly omitted. Nationality may be expected for non-EU candidates due to work authorization questions.

recommended

Quantify in the units that telecom hiring managers actually use

Quantify in the units that telecom hiring managers actually use. ARPU (average revenue per user), churn, gross adds, net adds, NPS, MTTR, network availability percentage, fiber homes-passed, 5G site count, customer base size, B2B accounts, and order-to-activation cycle time are the language. A bullet that reads 'managed customer service' is invisible; 'reduced inbound call rate by 18 percent across 2.4 million Free Mobile lines through self-care app redesign' gets read.

recommended

For Scaleway and Iliad Datacenter roles, lead with infrastructure specifics

For Scaleway and Iliad Datacenter roles, lead with infrastructure specifics. Name the stack: Linux distro, hypervisor or container runtime, orchestration (Kubernetes, Nomad), networking (BGP, VXLAN, SDN), storage (Ceph, ZFS, S3-compatible), observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry), CI/CD, and any cloud-provider experience. Open-source contributions, conference talks, and public technical writing are real signal at Scaleway.

recommended

For network engineering roles, list certifications and protocols clearly

For network engineering roles, list certifications and protocols clearly. CCNA, CCNP, JNCIA/JNCIP, RHCE, and vendor-specific certifications (Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, Huawei) carry weight. Protocol fluency (BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, MPLS, IPv6, DOCSIS for cable contexts, GPON for fiber, 5G NR for mobile core) should be explicit, not implied.

recommended

For commercial and B2B roles at Free Pro, lead with French enterprise account ex

For commercial and B2B roles at Free Pro, lead with French enterprise account experience. Named accounts, deal sizes in EUR, sales cycle length, win rates, and channel-partner relationships matter. Prior experience selling against Orange Business, SFR Business, and Bouygues Telecom Entreprises is directly relevant.

recommended

For customer service and call-center leadership, show language coverage and shif

For customer service and call-center leadership, show language coverage and shift management. Free runs French-language customer service primarily out of France with some near-shore support; Iliad Italia, Play, Eir, and Free Senegal each run their own local operations. Multilingual experience (French plus English plus another EU language) is a hiring lever for group-level roles.

recommended

Honestly state language levels using the CEFR scale (A2 / B1 / B2 / C1 / C2)

Honestly state language levels using the CEFR scale (A2 / B1 / B2 / C1 / C2). For French-perimeter roles, a B2 or higher in French is effectively required for non-engineering positions; many engineering roles will accept B1 plus strong English. Italian, Polish, and English fluency claims are routinely tested mid-interview by switching language without warning. Do not inflate.

recommended

Do not use heavily designed two-column or graphic-heavy CVs

Do not use heavily designed two-column or graphic-heavy CVs. The custom Iliad ATS, like most parsers, struggles with multi-column layouts, embedded images, text inside text boxes, and unusual fonts. A clean single-column PDF in a standard sans-serif at 10 to 11 point with section headings parses cleanly and reads well to a human.

recommended

If you have prior Niel-ecosystem affiliation, mention it

If you have prior Niel-ecosystem affiliation, mention it. Ecole 42 alumni, Station F resident teams, Kima Ventures portfolio company experience, or prior work at Free, Iliad, Scaleway, Eir, Play, or Iliad Italia is a recognizable signal in this orbit. State it plainly in education or experience; do not over-claim a relationship to Niel personally.



Interview Culture

Interview culture across the Iliad Group is direct, technical, and unsentimental.

The French heritage shows up in a preference for structured argument and a willingness to push back on candidates who overstate; recruiters expect you to defend specific claims on your CV with specific numbers. At Free and Iliad France, expect a thirty-minute recruiter screen in French, then one or two interviews with the hiring manager and team, and for senior roles a final interview with a director or, occasionally, a member of the executive committee. Engineering loops at Scaleway add a coding or systems-design exercise and a discussion of on-call and incident posture; the team is open-source-friendly and will respect candidates who can talk through real production trade-offs. Iliad Italia and Play follow comparable structures in local language. Eir's process is closer to a standard Irish corporate loop in English. Across all entities the tone is informal-but-rigorous: first names from the start, no required suit-and-tie for technical roles, but expect to be challenged on your reasoning. Niel-ecosystem references (Ecole 42, Station F, Kima portfolio companies) are recognized but not enough on their own; the group is past the stage where founder mythology substitutes for evidence. Compensation conversations happen openly and tend to land within posted ranges; counter-offers are accepted in good faith but the company is not loose with money, especially since delisting removed the equity lever entirely.

What Iliad Group (Free) Looks For

  • Comfort with a challenger, low-cost-disruptor posture against incumbents (Orange, SFR, Bouygues, TIM, Vodafone, Hutchison, AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Operational rigor and cost discipline; Iliad has built its market position by being structurally cheaper than competitors, not by outspending them.
  • Engineering depth for technical roles, with bonus weight for open-source contributions, conference talks, or public technical writing (especially for Scaleway).
  • Ability to work in the local language of the entity (French, Italian, Polish, English, French/Wolof for Senegal); honest CEFR levels are tested in interview.
  • Ownership and accountability; the group runs lean and individual contributors are expected to make and defend decisions, not wait for committee.
  • Pragmatism over ideology: candidates who can ship a workable solution fast tend to do better than candidates who optimize for theoretical perfection.
  • Comfort with a privately held, founder-controlled employer where strategic direction is set by Xavier Niel and a small executive group rather than by public-market governance.
  • Customer empathy at scale, especially for product, customer-experience, and B2C roles; Free's brand identity is built on being on the customer's side against the incumbents.
  • Mobility and curiosity across markets; the group spans France, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Senegal, and movement between subsidiaries is possible for the right people.
  • Resilience to consolidation uncertainty (Italian merger discussions, French market structure debates) without letting it paralyze day-to-day delivery.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Iliad publicly traded?
No. Iliad SA was listed on Euronext Paris from 2004 until founder Xavier Niel launched a tender offer through his holding vehicle HoldCo II in 2021 to take the company private. The full delisting completed in 2022. Today Iliad is privately held, with Niel as the dominant shareholder (approximately 75 percent) and a minority retained by other family interests. There is no public stock for employees to buy, no quarterly earnings call, and no employee stock plan equivalent to a US tech listing. Compensation is base, variable bonus, and local statutory benefits.
Who actually runs the company day to day?
Thomas Reynaud has been CEO of the Iliad operating group since 2018 and runs the day-to-day business. Xavier Niel is founder, Chairman, and dominant shareholder, and remains the strategic decision-maker on anything material: market entries, large acquisitions, brand strategy, and senior executive appointments. Operational autonomy of the subsidiary CEOs (Free, Iliad Italia, Play, Eir, Scaleway) is real, but anything that touches group strategy goes through Niel.
Which brands belong to the group, and which do not?
Inside the Iliad Group: Free and Free Mobile (France), Free Pro (B2B France), Iliad Italia (Italy), Play (Poland), Eir (Ireland, controlling stake), Free Senegal (formerly Tigo Senegal), Scaleway (cloud), and Iliad Datacenter. Outside the group but in the Niel personal orbit: Ecole 42 (the tuition-free coding school), Station F (Paris startup campus), Kima Ventures (Niel's seed VC), and stakes in Le Monde and La Provence newspapers. These are not Iliad employers, even though they are routinely mentioned in the same breath.
Do I need to speak French to work there?
It depends on the entity and the role. For most positions inside Free, Free Mobile, Free Pro, and Iliad Datacenter France, French at B2 or higher is effectively required. Scaleway runs largely in English because the team is international and English is acceptable for engineering roles, although French helps in Paris-based positions. Iliad Italia expects Italian. Play expects Polish, with English acceptable for senior and engineering roles. Eir runs in English. Free Senegal expects French, with Wolof useful for customer-facing work.
What ATS does Iliad use?
Iliad does not use a single off-the-shelf ATS like Workday or Greenhouse. The France perimeter runs on a custom in-house recruitment platform at recrutement.iliad.fr, built on a French HR tech stack (in the Talentsoft / Cegid family). Subsidiaries run their own portals: Scaleway at scaleway.com/en/jobs, Iliad Italia at iliad.it/lavora-con-noi, Play at play.pl/kariera, Eir at careers.eir.ie, and Free Senegal at free.sn. Profiles are not shared across these systems.
How aggressive is the disruptor culture, really?
Genuinely aggressive on price and market entry, less aggressive in day-to-day people management than the reputation might suggest. Free entered French mobile in 2012 with a EUR 19.99 unlimited plan that collapsed competitor pricing. Iliad Italia did the same in 2018. Play scales the same playbook in Poland. The internal culture is technical, lean, and direct, and individual contributors are expected to ship; it is not a Big Five consulting environment with layers of approval. It is also not a Silicon Valley unicorn with stock options and free meals.
Is the Vodafone Italia deal happening?
Iliad has been in on-and-off discussions with Vodafone about combining Iliad Italia with Vodafone Italia, and the deal status as of 2025 is still fluid. A combined entity would reshape the Italian mobile market and would need regulatory approval at both Italian and EU levels. For candidates, the practical implication is that an Iliad Italia role today carries some integration uncertainty; you should ask directly in the interview how the team is planning around it. The company is unlikely to share confidential deal terms but will share how the team is positioned.
How does Scaleway compete against AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud?
Scaleway is a substantially smaller player than the US hyperscalers and competes primarily on European sovereignty, EU data residency, pricing for specific workloads (notably bare metal and ARM compute), and a developer-friendly product surface. It is not trying to be feature-for-feature equivalent to AWS. Its closer competitor at scale is OVHcloud, the larger French sovereign cloud. For engineers, this means working on a real cloud platform with genuine technical depth, but with the resource constraints of a challenger, not a hyperscaler.
What about working at Eir, Play, or Free Senegal?
These subsidiaries operate with meaningful local autonomy. Eir is a long-standing Irish telecom with an English-language workforce, an Irish labor framework, and an established fiber and 5G build-out program. Play is the largest mobile operator in Poland by subscribers, with a Polish-language workforce and a Warsaw operating base; integration with the broader Iliad group is light-touch. Free Senegal operates in Senegal under local labor law in French (with Wolof in retail and customer service). Each has its own career portal and its own hiring process.
Is there equity, profit-sharing, or any upside beyond base and bonus?
There is no employee stock option or RSU program, because Iliad has been private since 2022. French employees benefit from statutory profit-sharing schemes (participation et interessement) where applicable, plus the standard French benefits package (mutuelle, titres-restaurant, transport reimbursement, RTT). Italian, Polish, Irish, and Senegalese employees receive locally compliant equivalents. Senior hires sometimes receive a signing bonus or a multi-year cash incentive plan. Negotiation is on cash levers, not equity.
What is the work environment like at Iliad headquarters in Paris?
The Iliad headquarters at 16 Rue de la Ville l'Eveque sits in the 8th arrondissement, near the Madeleine, a few minutes from the Champs-Elysees and the Elysee Palace. The building reflects a Parisian-corporate aesthetic rather than a startup loft. Working hours follow the French 35-hour-week framework with realistic flex; long days happen during launches and incidents, but the culture is not the burnout-by-default culture of some US tech companies. Hybrid work is common for office roles. Retail, datacenter, and field-engineering roles are obviously on-site.
How do unions and worker representation work here?
In France, Iliad and Free are subject to standard French labor law, including the Convention Collective des Telecommunications, with elected works councils (CSE) and the usual French union landscape (CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC) representing employees. Italian, Polish, Irish, and Senegalese employees are covered by their respective national frameworks. The company is not famously confrontational with unions, but it is also not a soft-touch employer; standard French collective-bargaining dynamics apply.

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Sources

  1. Iliad Group official corporate site
  2. Iliad SA - delisting and HoldCo II tender offer
  3. Free careers and recruitment portal
  4. Scaleway careers
  5. Iliad Italia - Lavora con noi
  6. Play (P4 sp. z o.o.) careers - Polska
  7. Eir careers - Ireland
  8. Free Senegal corporate site
  9. Reuters - Iliad to acquire Play in Poland (2020)
  10. Reuters - Iliad-Vodafone Italia merger talks coverage
  11. Arcep - French telecom regulatory authority
  12. Ecole 42 - tuition-free coding school founded by Xavier Niel