Dynatech is a unique tech company in many ways, as it employs over 250 technical people to support all the global brands in the Dyninno Group. Founded in 2016, the company utilizes modern technologies to develop the ever-expanding product portfolio while ensuring the high quality of the code.
We interviewed Jurijs Saveljevs, Lead Software Engineer, and Viesturs Teivans, Tech Lead, to find how they have set up their tech stack and daily work. The interview covers topics including the benefits of Node.JS & Typescript, what mistakes Dynatech has made when choosing technologies and how they approach data-driven decision-making.
The Interview
🔵 To start at the beginning, what does the company Dynatech do exactly?
Jurijs: Dynatech is a global business center based in Riga, Latvia. Among others, we provide IT services and solutions for all the businesses within the Dyninno Group, consisting of three divisions: Travel, Entertainment and FinTech. There are many independent businesses within the conglomerate, and Dynatech is the unified technology company powering them. Mainly by IT services but also competencies in marketing, HR, project management, etc.
🔵 How is the work divided between different teams in Dynatech?
Viesturs: The work is divided mostly by product. Within each of these three areas of the Dyninno Group, we have specific products with specific teams. Sometimes teams have multiple projects at hand because some of them only need to be maintained. It’s also possible to migrate between them, for example, if a person is interested in a technical problem that involves a specific product.
We also have people like Jurijs who work on R&D. This is a shared team that supports the infrastructure of all our products. For example, they pick the new technologies and research the best practices for implementing them. That helped us a lot in migration to Kubernetes and automated pipelines.
🔵 Can you describe a bit what projects you are working on these days? What do you like the most about them?
Viesturs: I’m developing a new flight search product which consists of several Node.js applications. In addition to writing the code, I’m also very involved in managing the code quality to keep it easily maintainable and ensure that we have proper unit tests. A lot of it is automated, but we still make sure that people use this automation consistently, and we don’t end up with spaghetti code.
We’ve had several major refactors during the project, and those were mostly pretty easy. For example, we have changed the internal data structure for the search functionality two times, which is an enormous refactor for all the services that need to operate on it. I make sure that things like that go smoothly.
Jurijs: I’m working more on infrastructure and applying best practices to the application development flow. We’re currently moving to orchestrated environments, mostly Kubernetes, which means we run multiple clusters for multiple products in various Kubernetes installations. Mostly on AWS EKS, but we are also experimenting with DigitalOcean. We have some exposure in Russia, where we use Yandex.Cloud, and we are also researching some Asian cloud providers. So I’m into orchestration and bootstrapping applications for that.
The second thing I’m working on is application metrics, so whenever there is an anomaly in how the product or runtime behaves, we get alerted. And the third is ensuring the continuous deployment for our applications, including making sure that every application is built and containerized correctly, and doesn’t have any known security vulnerabilities or obvious bugs that we can catch with static code analysis.
Jurijs Saveljevs, Lead Software Engineer at Dynatech
🔵 Dynatech relies heavily on Node.js and JavaScript/TypeScript at the back-end. Could you explain the strategy behind this technology choice? What are the main advantages?
Viesturs: We use TypeScript and Node.js for almost all new projects, definitely for most of them. I think TypeScript and Node.js are the golden middle technologies because they support a variety of modern use cases very well, for example, data streaming and application instances. TypeScript also tremendously helps with ensuring the code quality. At the same time, JavaScript is a familiar language for many developers, which simplifies the onboarding of new people. Web developers already know at least some JavaScript, so they can jump in quickly.
🔵 What principles do you follow when choosing new technologies?
Jurijs: We indeed have some key factors that we value in technology choices. One of them is open-sourceness because whenever something doesn’t fit, you can identify the issue and improve it. We actively contribute to some open-source projects, especially to the infrastructure stuff where there aren’t many administrative tools for the job. We like Node.js & TypeScript especially because of the self debugging and profiling. These problems were solved a long time ago, and you don’t need to worry about them.
Viesturs: In the case of Node.JS, another great strength is the mature and highly active community. If you have an issue with some package, it’s likely that the solution already exists. Yes, it still might not be optimal, and you may need to contribute, but overall, it speeds up the development a lot.
🔵 Have you had any significant strategic mistakes when building your technology stack?
Jurijs: The major misdirections were probably related to how we make critical decisions. The first thing that comes to mind was the tendency to split everything up into microservices. We followed that trend too aggressively and spread the services too thin, this is now known as the nano service anti-pattern. Fortunately, we managed to fix it by reunifying some functionality, but we definitely had that problem back in the day.
The other misdirection was the tendency to build custom solutions for the things that already existed. It’s called the “not invented here” syndrome, which sometimes happens in huge companies. At some point, we were at around 300 tech tools, some of which were probably built just because folks wanted to try something new. Or there was one feature lacking, so they copied the entire product plus the one missing feature. We have fixed this issue by introducing a formal process for technology decisions.
Viesturs: We also have sometimes chosen the wrong technology for the project. One unhappy project is running on Hack, which is a version of PHP by Facebook. The major challenge with it is the lack of community, which means you have to write everything yourself. Even something as simple as ORM to use your database correctly. Although the ORM exists, it has issues, probably because someone somewhere didn’t have time to finish it properly. It’s a super weird scenario that wouldn’t happen with any normal open-source ORM. And in the end, Hack doesn’t solve much other than what PHP already does.
🔵 How do you ensure the quality of your codebase? How does your tech stack help you with the ease of refactoring?
Viesturs: TypeScript is the key here because it allows a lot out of the box. You can see if you’ve updated the interface everywhere you need to. Of course, a lot of typed languages support that as well, but in this case, we use JavaScript because it’s super familiar to everyone.
The next thing is this decoupling of code, the modularity. During my time here, I have introduced a principle that if your application uses an external service, it has to have its own service around it. Therefore, if you change the API or the application requirements, you can simply create a bit of middleware that translates the input to whatever your application needs.
And finally, unit tests. All the interfaces won’t save you with major refactors, like changing the data structure for a service that’s already running. It may look like it’s working on the surface, but then some response comes back as the wrong type, etc. Once you have the unit tests, they can actually show you what’s working or not. And then you have to either update the test, if the data structure has changed, or update the code.
Viesturs Teivans, Tech Lead at Dynatech
🔵 Let’s talk about testing for a moment. How have you organised the testing major updates, so both the developers and business people stay happy?
Viesturs: For the business people, it’s the metrics. Are there enough requests? Do the clients react how we expected? If they don’t, then is it a bug? So monitoring is the big thing when we’re in production.
In the testing environment, we have automated unit tests for the Node.js applications. They run in the QA pipeline, and if something does not pass, we don’t merge it. The major releases are also tested semi-automatically by our QA people. They check things like if the user does something, does the correct log message happen? Do we get the correct change database?
Jurijs: We also use some functional tests in production to ensure the quality of service. Periodic tests, targeted at the production environment, are performing the users’ usual workflows. In the case of an online ticket agency, we might search for flight tickets or a destination. And we can verify if we find what we need. We have such tests for the vital functions of every service.
We also use stress and load testing to monitor known bottlenecks and search for unknown ones. We run the stress tests mostly on the production environment in off-peak hours. These tests don’t run periodically, but we perform them on-demand after notable component changes.
🔵 How did you come up with the data streaming approach for the microservices? What is it, and how do you use it currently?
Viesturs: I think it’s a pretty popular solution currently. The idea behind the data stream is that Redis is handling the data transfer between services. One of the advantages is reducing strain on the network. If you have numerous services trying to communicate with each other, you put enormous pressure on the network. Even in the case of internal services, there might be gigabytes of data flying here and there. People sometimes tend to ignore those internal processes as they don’t go over the internet, but if we have 300+ services that talk with each other, then the situation becomes pretty bad.
The second advantage is ensuring that the data ends up where it needs to. Because the data stays in the Redis, any service that needs it can get it. In some ways, it’s insurance against processing errors. For instance, if a service has an error and needs rebooting, then after coming back up, it can simply check the data and continue where it left off. In terms of the actual code, it’s also more understandable with data streaming. The data stream is usually observable, and the service that called it already has the context for maintaining the data.
Jurijs: Data streaming allows us to predictably design system communication. In a classical RPC flow, a service would send a request and then get results in return. But data streaming guarantees that we can provide the results. Also, you can ping results any time or share them across the systems as long as everyone is aware of the DTL. It allows very efficient contracts for spreading data across the system.
🔵 How do you use the data in daily discussions?
Jurijs: We genuinely believe in data-driven decision-making. In any argument, whether it’s tech-related or it’s business-related, the person who wins is the one who has numbers that are gathered correctly and prove his opinion. If we don’t already have the data, then we follow a pretty scientific process to collect it. For example, we might set out to test a hypothesis that building X will improve Y in some way. If you share this belief in data and the scientific method of doing things, you fit into our team very well.
Viesturs: And I guess most programmers probably do! (Laughing)
Jurijs: Hopefully!
🔵 And finally, what type of developers would fit into the Dynatech team the best, in your opinion?
Jurijs: It might sound naive, but the answer is that we need people who share our values. We believe in quality: If you invest time in better design, optimisation or automation, from our experience, it usually pays off. We are searching for folks who believe the same.
Viesturs: I absolutely agree. We value people who are passionate and aim for quality in the code they deliver. Also, we expect that people can support their opinions with data. When it comes to tech choices, the “I want to try something new and cool” approach is not good enough. We have to pick the tools that are best for solving a specific problem.
For example, just before the interview, we were arguing with Jurijs about tech choices. We invite these arguments because the best solutions arise from the creative conflict. The idea is that you can bring your own opinion, but you also have to support it with a use case.
Welcome to Part 2 of the guide on how to get your first job at a tech company with Giedre Dubisevaite. She is a People Manager at Whatagraph, a SaaS platform for collecting and visualizing marketing data gathered from many channels. Whatagraph has tripled its team to 60+ people in 2020 with ambitious plans for 2021 as well.
If you haven’t already, make sure to read Part 1 of the interview, which covers the first steps for getting a job, including building a LinkedIn profile and sending an outstanding application.
The Interview
🔵 We pick up the conversation from Part 1 at a place where the candidate has cleared the first hurdle and left a good first impression on the recruiter. What happens next? How does Whatagraph’s hiring process look and how long does it usually take to complete it?
It actually very much depends on the role and the team. As a rule of thumb, if we receive an excellent candidate, we do not wait a month to send an offer but rather do it straight away. So if you hesitate whether to apply, today is always better than tomorrow.
In terms of the hiring process, the candidates usually go through the following steps:
Application (can be done via email or by applying on our careers page)
Screening
Interview with a team lead
Assignment
Meet the team / Cultural fit interview
Offer
We are big fans of adjusting the hiring process to the specific position, so the candidate gets the opportunity to show off the specific skills as well as get to know the team before deciding to join. After all, it’s an evaluation journey for both parties.
For example, when hiring for a Sales role, we usually invite candidates for a role play with our team. Also, they get to participate in the Experience day, where you get to meet the team and see how your daily tasks will look. For a position like Product Designer, we might give you a scenario with a real UX problem to solve to see how you approach challenges.
🔵 How different are the recruiting processes for various positions, for example, technical vs non-technical roles?
I wouldn’t make a distinction between technical and non-technical roles because each position is different. We look not only at professional experience but also at soft skills that are specific to the position.
Almost every role we are recruiting for will have an assignment step – technical or non-technical. We have found it works well for understanding the candidate’s approach to tasks in general, but it also allows them to show off their practical skills.
🔵 What’s your favourite question to ask at interviews? Why?
While our Team Leaders focus on more technical questions, I like to pay close attention to the personality and cultural fit. When we hire people, our goal is to onboard them on a long-term journey with Whatagraph, so we make sure the new hires share our vision, commitment and values. So my favourite question is “Where do you do your best work?”. It might sound like a simple question, but it actually gives a lot of insights.
For example, it shows if you are a team or an individual player, what motivates you and what management style is the best to support you. Also, it highlights if you thrive in a fast-paced environment full of challenges and if you feel comfortable working at a startup like Whatagraph.
My second favourite would be “What would motivate you to stay in the company for the next 5 years?”.
🔵 Let’s say the talent has triumphantly completed the hiring process and is ready to start their career at Whatagraph. How does the onboarding process look like when most of the team is (presumably) working remotely?
When a new person joins the company remotely, the first week is booked with meetings – we believe it is important to see the faces of the people you will be working with daily.
During your first week, you get to know our Operations and HR team, have intros with your own team and get to meet our CEO Justas. We make it clear that everyone in the company is approachable, and each question is important. Weekly check-ins also help to keep the pulse of the new hire.
To meet people from other teams, we have regular Whatachat events. It’s like speed dating with your colleagues, where you get matched with random people for 5-minute video conversations, which is quite fun. 🙂
🔵 How has the year of remote work changed how Whatagraph operates?
We learned a lot over the past year about working remotely, and although it hasn’t affected how we work that much, there were a few things that we learned to do better.
Communication, for example. It’s easy to set up all day meetings to give everyone a sense of ‘working together‘, yet it’s time-consuming and tiring, especially when working from home.
Instead, we worked a lot on documentation – writing up the processes step by step, creating handbooks, guidelines and explainer videos. We also use task management platforms that give a transparent view of where everyone in the team is, and we moved a lot of conversations offline.
🔵 What should a person expect from his/her first-ever job in a start-up?
I would compare working at a startup to riding a bullet train – you jump in and ride at full speed from day one. It’s not really about lounging on bean bags and playing Playstation 4 hours per day.
At Whatagraph, the pace indeed is fast, which can be challenging for some. But what you get in return is the environment to grow rapidly both professionally and as a person. It would take twice as long to become an outstanding talent in any other company. Here, you can do that in a few months, guided and supported by our experienced Team Leaders.
We trust our people to take ownership and get hands-on tasks from day one. And sometimes, mistakes are made, but it’s a risk we are willing to take. We say that a bad page can always be edited, but a blank one – cannot. Getting our hands dirty is how we deliver more than expected and how we grow at scale.
And amidst the thriving environment for talent, we have our team. We are all very different, complementing each other with skills and knowledge, but what unites us is the sense that we are all together in this magical journey. Everyone is super supportive and friendly – we leave our egos at the door and focus on collaboration every single day.
🔵 Are there any things specific to SaaS companies compared to start-ups in other areas?
When working in a SaaS company, a focus is on the product and the service we offer. To succeed in any of the teams, you need to know the product exceptionally well because you will be either making it, selling it, supporting it or marketing it. So this knowledge is essential.
In their first week, new joiners meet our Customer Success team, where they thoroughly learn the platform and have a knowledge building session to cover the use cases of how marketing professionals use Whatagraph to become data scientists.
🔵 Maybe you can give some examples of team events or routines that are unique to Whatagraph?
Even though we are over 60 people now, sometimes it still feels like a small family. Current situation and remote work has put a lot of stress on how people feel in general, and for us it is important to have this sense of community alive, and to support each other. So we have remote team activities where we connect people from different teams and give them time and space to talk while doing something fun, not work-related. For example, the bi-weekly Whatachat events mentioned earlier.
Obviously, we dearly miss our office activities like weekly team breakfasts, hearing the gong from the sales room every time we have a new customer onboarded, or a bell ping every time a demo is booked, going for a team picnic outside, or just getting together for a beer or two. The time away from the office provided us with a lot of space to get new ideas of activities inside and outside the office, so I’m really looking forward to implementing them! For example, enabling our teams in Vilnius and Klaipeda to switch offices – who wouldn’t want to work with a view over the Curonian Lagoon during the day and then chill by the sea in the evening?
Check out Whatagraph’s open positions on MeetFrank:
🔵 Especially at the start of your career, you might find out that your initial career path is not the best fit for you. How easily can you move between different teams and roles within Whatagraph?
Easy. That’s the best part about working in a fast-growing company like Whatagraph. I joined the company five years ago as a Marketing Specialist, and during my time here, I had a chance to work in Customer Success, Product and Operations teams. This experience helped me find the areas I enjoy most, and now I found my place as the People Manager.
Marija, our Head of Operations, started her career as a Partnerships Development Executive in our Sales team. Žilvinas, who leads our affiliate marketing program, worked as an Outreach Specialist before taking up the new position.
There are plenty of opportunities, and with the current pace of hiring, they are coming up all the time. It’s the matter of you taking that step and making good use of it.
Tech companies are attractive employers in many industries and ready to offer young talents remarkable growth opportunities. However, getting your first job, in a start-up or otherwise, might seem daunting. How to stand out from the other candidates? How to present yourself to a recruiter? 🤔
To find answers to all those questions, we interviewed Giedre Dubisevaite, People Manager at Whatagraph, which is a SaaS platform for collecting and visualizing marketing data gathered from many channels. She is a perfect interviewee because Whatagraph has been on a bit of a hiring spree lately, tripling its team to 60+ people in 2020 with ambitious plans for 2021 as well.
The interview is divided into two parts: this article will cover what recruiters look like besides the work experience, how to make your application stand out, and how to build a professional LinkedIn presence. The second part focuses on everything that happens after you have been invited to an interview.
The Interview
🔵 The summer is nearing, which means people are out there eyeing a new job, maybe their first job ever. Suppose you are such a person without a lot of industry experience. Do you really have a chance in the job market at all when every job seems to require previous work experience?
Absolutely, the beginning of a new season tends to summon the longing for change, right? The good news is that Whatagraph already has several entry positions open, and we will have a lot more in the next few weeks. It’s enough to have strong motivation and interpersonal skills to apply for entry positions – we invest heavily in new people and make sure they receive sufficient training to succeed.
Of course, there are positions where experience is a must, like leadership roles. And having worked in similar positions is always seen as an advantage. That said, when we are recruiting for junior positions at Whatagraph, experience is not the only thing we look at, but also things like internships, volunteering projects, courses, and life experiences that might have developed the skills needed.
🔵 Could you give a specific example of what you look for in candidates applying for junior positions? Besides the relevant work experience, of course.
Sure, let’s take our Partnerships Development Executive (PDE) role as an example. It is a junior sales position, so I do not expect people to have a strong B2B SaaS sales knowledge. Instead, I look at:
LinkedIn profile. PDEs will be communicating a lot with our leads, so it is crucial to have a LinkedIn presence. Is the profile filled out? Is it professional? Does the person know how to sell himself or herself? If yes, then there’s a huge chance he/she will know how to sell to others as well.
Life experience. You can gain the skills needed to excel as a PDE anywhere: Customer-facing positions, fast-paced environments, even leading a school committee – all these experiences tell a story. When I read ‘a waiter’, I see a person who is most likely used to working long hours under pressure. When I read ‘studied abroad’, I see a person who is not afraid of challenges. These are all super beneficial skills when working in our Sales team at Whatagraph.
🔵 There’s, of course, truth to the fact that your first job might be one of the hardest to get, even if you have been active as a student. How should you present yourself as a junior to be seen as a serious candidate by recruiters?
1️⃣ First, put the effort into the application. There’s nothing worse than getting just an attached resume in an empty email. Spend some time saying hi, explaining why you are interested in this position and what makes you a good candidate. It doesn’t have to be too long – a few accurate and witty sentences are more than enough.
2️⃣ Second, show that you know the company. Do your research. Offer solutions/ideas. For example, we had a developer applying for a position where instead of sending a resume, he researched our website and sent a list of possible improvements. Guess what? He got invited to a job interview and was hired soon after.
3️⃣ Third, adapt your resume to the position. Look through the job specs – what skills are we after? Try to showcase them in your resume and application letter. Tell a story of how you have gained these skills through previous experiences.
4️⃣ Fourth, make sure your social media presence shows the best side of you, especially the LinkedIn profile. Don’t just leave it empty and thus open for interpretation.
5️⃣ Fifth, and probably most important, show your motivation and excitement to join a company like Whatagraph.
🔵 You mentioned building a LinkedIn profile, which is a fascinating subject in itself. Do you have any tips on how to present yourself professionally on LinkedIn? Are there any red lines that the candidate should avoid at all cost?
There are so many things that make up a good LinkedIn profile! We could do a separate interview just on this. 🙂
First of all, if you do not have a LinkedIn profile already, create it. An up-to-date LinkedIn profile works as your resume, so in many cases, it is enough to apply for a job at Whatagraph.
Your profile photo leaves a first impression. It will do you a favour if it’s recent and professional. Avoid cropped images where your face is invisible as well as too distracting accessories.
Your LinkedIn headline is also one of the main fields that make up the first impression when someone lands on your LinkedIn profile. It should be quite generic but still reflect what and where you do.
Make sure your experience section it’s updated regularly and matches your resume. Mention things like the organizations you have worked or volunteered in, add a list of specific responsibilities and note your main achievements.
The number of connections shows your social presence and reputation in a sense. If it’s 500+, you’re doing a good job. But if you’ve just created your LinkedIn profile and have two connections, I’ll tell you a secret – some tools automatically send requests to connect with people without you lifting a finger.
🔵 If a person has already covered the LinkedIn profile basics, then what are some of the advanced features?
Write an “About” section. It should introduce you professionally in a few sentences and cover a couple of different things:
What is your speciality?
How many years of experience do you have?
In what industries have you worked?
Your achievements, ideally reflected in numbers. We love data.
Licences and certification. If you have something to add – do it, it does give a sense of credibility. Also, use a custom LinkedIn URL – it looks way more professional than default-full-of-random-digits URL that LinkedIn automatically generates.
That’s it for this time! Check out Part Two to find out how to nail the interview and the rest of the recruiting process.
🔵 However, if the previous answers left you wondering about a career in Whatagraph, what open positions do you have right now? Do you have any entry-level opportunities at the moment?
Absolutely! Our hiring plan is ambitious, and we need a lot of people to jump on this train with us. We have openings in Engineering, Product Design, Marketing and Sales teams.
Check out Whatagraph’s open positions on MeetFrank:
We have already started scaling our Engineering team, so we are looking for Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers, Engineering Managers and QA Specialists. By the time this interview is out, we’ll have settled in our new Klaipeda office overlooking the Curonian Lagoon with the perfect view for our weekly tech breakfasts. Having grown the engineering team, we’ll definitely need additional hands in the Product Design team as well.
We are also growing our Marketing team, so we are searching for Outreach Specialists, which is the perfect entry position for those looking to advance their skills in SEO. Other open positions in Marketing include PPC Specialists and Influencer Managers.
The Sales team will welcome Client Partners and Partnerships Development Executives, the latter is the perfect entry position for anyone looking to kick off their career in B2B SaaS sales.
You might have heard about the product called NordVPN, but do you know the company behind it, Nord Security? The company started its journey in 2012 inside the Tesonet accelerator, and it has rapidly grown ever since. Today, Nord Security is one of the largest tech-companies in Lithuania in its own right, with nearly 700 employees and 15 million users worldwide.
Only recently they stepped outside of Tesonet to separately start building their company culture and employer brand. We talked with Karina Dirvonskienė, Head of HR at Nord Security, about why they are doing this, how it is going and why should the talent care?
The Interview
First of all, congratulations on starting your employer journey. Could you tell us a bit about how it came to life? Why did you choose to do it now, and what challenges did it bring?
Thanks! Starting Nord Security’s employer journey is indeed a big step for us.
It’s no secret that the story of our company began with the inception of NordVPN, which at the moment is one of the most popular VPN service providers worldwide. It was the 35th project developed inside the ecosystem of the Tesonet accelerator, and over time it grew beyond our expectations. Today we are a team of nearly 700 employees and have expanded our product family by adding four new cybersecurity tools (NordPass, NordLocker, NordLayer, and NordWL). And it’s definitely not the end – we are still growing exponentially.
As it often happens, the new beginning brought us some challenges. In the past, we could rely on the Tesonet brand to fulfil our needs as an employer, but now we have to build our own employer brand from scratch. However, we’re optimistic about it since we’ve already made some progress.
Could you introduce your products to people not too familiar with the cybersecurity market? How are they received in the market so far?
At the moment, Nord Security has more than 15 million users worldwide that trust our products to ensure their privacy online. Basically, our goal is to provide true online privacy and security to as many people as we can. That also means building awareness around cybersecurity issues and their importance in the connected world.
As I’ve already mentioned, our story began with NordVPN – currently the fastest VPN on the planet, built to protect our users’ online presence from cybersecurity threats. To put it simply, you can secure your internet data and safely access personal information while browsing with NordVPN.
We also built the same solution for businesses to ensure their employee privacy online while working – NordVPNTeams. Then, there’s NordPass – an easy-to-use password manager used for storing and creating credentials. NordLocker helps to store and share confidential files securely. Finally, NordWL – a collection of tools, know-how, and infrastructure for building your own VPN products.
These five products form the Nord Security productfamily and have gained global recognition with high praise from major tech outlets and cybersec experts alike. However, we’re always looking for new opportunities to grow, so the product line-up is definitely not final.
In your first month as a separate entity, Nord Security already became the 4th most popular company on MeetFrank in Lithuania. Clearly, there’s a lot of interest from the jobseekers at the moment. What’s special about working for Nord Security? Why should people join your organization?
Where do I even begin 🙂 Well, first of all, we’re a fast-growing company with a very dynamic environment set up for professional growth. The essential thing is that every person joining our team gets to build global solutions that solve relevant problems. You can be sure that you’ll be working with top experts from all over the world and gain valuable experience.
Knowledge sharing is vastly promoted in our company and is, in fact, one of our key values – we have various initiatives, internal and external events, and even separate programs designed for personal and professional growth. Nord Security is also a very diverse company that gives people the freedom to act – you will find plenty of opportunities to express yourself and show initiative.
Could you list some of the perks that your employees enjoy?
Our colleagues enjoy numerous benefits focused on increasing their well-being, like private health insurance, mental health programs, bonus vacation days, in-house physiotherapists, flexible work hours, and more. Also, we’re famous for our workations and various celebrations.
However, in our opinion, all these perks are simply an addition to our main benefits – a great team, ambitious goals and exciting projects to work on.
What about employee dynamics – do you hire more local or global specialists, and does this put additional strain on your HR team?
As our company was founded in Lithuania, we currently have more local team members. However, we’re actively growing our international ranks and have colleagues working in Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Romania, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, and Brazil.
Hiring worldwide and expanding our reach is certainly more demanding than hiring locally. It’s a challenge to extend a feeling of belonging to team members working remotely. However, the current pandemic situation benefited us in this regard: It accelerated our remote work practices, and now we feel that we’ve become stronger as a global employer.
How many vacancies do you have at the moment? Which departments of the company are you expanding the most rapidly?
At the moment, we have more than 80 vacancies waiting to be filled, and mostly we’re looking for professionals to join our teams of Frontend, Backend, Mobile, and Marketing. However, we’re actively expanding other teams as well – take a look at our Career page – I’m sure you’ll find several options, including challenging leadership roles.
What are the most important qualities when hiring new people to the Nord Security team? Do you have any tips for the applicants to be successful in your hiring process?
We look for people who are passionate about tech and eager to learn new things quickly. The cybersecurity and IT markets are constantly changing. Breakthroughs are coming every day. As a team, we have to be ready for the shifting environment and the challenges it brings.
We place a high value on people, who challenge the status quo, look for better ways to do things, and do not agonize over decision making. There’s also a lot of focus on teamwork – we believe that magic happens in teams, so there are no individual agents here.
Cavai, founded in 2018, builds conversational advertising tools with a focus on protecting consumers’ privacy. Their approach seems to be gaining traction, at least judging by their client list, which includes global heavyweights like McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz, and HBO. Last year they announced new hires to key senior positions and significant growth plans, accompanied by a funding round.
Cavai’s Chief Technology Officer is Mikko Kotila, a self-described “mad scientist”, who offered us a captivating look into the philosophy behind Cavai’s company culture. Find out what challenges can working in the ad-tech offer to developers, why the best thing a manager can do is to get out of the way of great talent, and what they are looking for in new hires.
THE INTERVIEW
Although some of the world’s most valuable brands use your product for advertising campaigns, regular people seldom hear about Cavai itself. How would you describe Cavai’s product to a non-marketing audience?
Cavai has created the first mainstream advertising technology platform that is built “people first.” Unlike thousands of other ad platforms, we never collect or do anything with people’s data. At Cavai, we build everything following strict privacy-by-design principles. I think that is something many people will be able to relate to. We have an undying commitment to making advertising better, and it starts with the fact that it can’t be dependent on exploiting people’s data.
On MeetFrank, you advertise Cavai’s positions with an ambitious tagline “The most wanted job in ad-tech”. Cavai’s excellent net promoter score 79 seems to confirm this. What makes your company culture unique?
Business is about people and only people. The company and its shareholder value is simply a collection of people and their activities and the results of those activities. I think it is easy to accept that love is a better experience than fear. We actively seek out fear placed approaches, which are rampant in modern corporate culture, and replace them with love based ones.
Everyone in Cavai has the exact same job description – “Do your best work”.
And everyone who works in leadership follows the same management principle – “Get out people’s way and make sure they have what they need and want.”
Although Cavai has many offices across Europe with HQ in Oslo, you also offer an option to work 100% remotely. Does Cavai have any rules at all concerning the working place and time? What about vacation time?
Our R&D HQ is in Helsinki. We are really thankful for having a strong employer brand in the area surrounding Helsinki. There is tremendous culture for advanced engineering work in that area.
We have 100% flexibility in terms of where and when you want to work. We are also experimenting with flexible holidays and other less conventional approaches.
Cavai’s stated management philosophy is that the team leaders should communicate the vision and then basically get out of the way of great talent. How did you arrive at this philosophy at Cavai? Have there been any particular experiences in the past that have shaped it?
I think great engineers are looking for mastery in their craft. As much as it is useful to have a relationship with someone looking after you and helping you make small corrections along the way, mastery is very much a personal experience. You will use an incredible amount of time by yourself working on something. It is useful to have guides, but it is there only because then you know you have that kind of support available when you need it and want it.
What can work in the ad-tech sector offer to software engineers that other sectors can’t? Maybe you can introduce a few key issues that Cavai’s development team is tackling right now?
The daily online advertising ecosystem footprint is roughly one trillion connections. Some of the most exciting computational advancements are taking place in advertising technology. There are a lot of technical challenges like concurrency that almost no other industry has.
Because Cavai focuses on creative technology, there is an opportunity for us to make advertising better. Because right now, advertising online is mostly awful and is completely disconnected from people. I prefer that the world is free from ads, but I think it is more realistic to make ads better. Let’s make ads more about people and less about whatever it is about now.
Last year, Cavai announced significant growth plans, and with that comes the need for additional team members. What qualities are you looking for when making a new hire?
Great cultural fit
Active contributor to the open-source community
Aspires to attain mastery.
I want to thank everyone who has applied for a job with Cavai or even thought about it. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with such amazing people. Thank you.
