As businesses around the world start heading towards a data-oriented approach, they are looking for automated ways to analyze publicly available data. Such is the solution provided by Oxylabs, a company that provides data API platforms like scrapers and proxy-related infrastructure.
Recently we sat down with Zydrunas Tamasauskas, Head of Product Development, to learn about how they manage fast-moving engineering teams, their go-to technologies and the overall approach to developing new products used by Fortune 500 companies.
🔵 Tell us a bit about Oxylabs as a company. What are your products and what’s unique about them?
Oxylabs really stands as a great, fast-moving tech company developing data services. We work with world-class engineering solutions and product development activities, where uniqueness comes in many forms. Our engineering department builds solutions that are yet to be patented or even applied in practice with high load and distributed computing systems.
Our main products are proxy and web-scraping tools. To put it simply, we provide an infrastructure to gather large-scale public data using web-scraping technology. What’s distinct about our services is the quality – our clients are among the largest companies in the world, many being listed in Fortune 500.
🔵 What drives you forward in the competitive market?
Being one of the top 3 products in the field is a great motivation by itself. The question is how to move up from there?
We have no singular path forward, which is why we love to experiment, innovate and fail fast to stay competitive. I’d say this drives us the most. The notion of building something faster, more effective, and completely new to the world drives engineering teams forward and thus affects product and marketing too. This makes us feel like inventors that bring change to the market.
🔵 Are you a product or a data-driven company? How do you measure the success of your products?
I believe as a company, we are product-led and data-informed. Data can be inaccurate and misleading, so sometimes, we just need to trust our hearts and minds. Being one of the leaders in the industry means that there are no footsteps to follow. That’s why we use our qualitative and quantitative data to get an idea of what we are going to build next.
As we strive to build better products, we measure metrics like customer satisfaction, ease of use, adoption rate, support issues, and similar. Of course, from the business perspective, product revenue always plays an important role. On a personal level, positive feedback from our customers who use the product daily and love it makes us proud and drives us to do even better.
🔵 Is there a way to predict the next big thing in the market that might just be the game-changer?
Since we are pioneers in our field, a large share of the innovation comes from our own people. Most of the developers at Oxylabs have been using proxies or data scraping at some point in their careers, so we try to build products for ourselves. This helps us figure out new product ideas and use cases. Then we start with building an MVP (minimum viable product) and check if something sticks. If it doesn’t, we scrap it and go for another big idea.
Some MVPs can be done even without writing a single line of code by using no-code or low code tools. We live by the idea of failing fast, improving faster. So, to answer the question: we don’t try to predict the next big thing. We just observe what features our users adapt and keep polishing them.
🔵 What, if any, are the go-to technologies at Oxylabs?
We don’t consider ourselves ‘tech-purists’, so we constantly incorporate something new to our tech stack, but it also depends on the hiring market.
Here in Vilnius, PHP is the most popular language, which is quite a nice language for writing APIs. We use Python for parsing, scraping, and data analysis due to its awesome libraries. In the front-end, React is a no-brainer as we also build browser extensions, mobile apps, and desktop apps (Electron, React Native). Golang is a fast language, so it was crucial to use it in our infrastructure, which gets an insane amount of load. As our front-end developers are switching to full-stack, we are now also incorporating Node.js, which gives them a lot of new cool stuff to learn.
🔵 How do you know what is the right technology to go with? How to stay relevant?
The choices depend on what we are doing with the technology, the appliances or goals that we strive to achieve, and what talent pool we have internally to use it. We already have a stable technology stack, and we evaluate new ones if we see them potentially beneficial for the product or the engineering community.
At some point, there might be a situation where previously widespread technology or framework falls in popularity, degrades in quality, or the hiring market dries up. Then we have to take action and replace it with something new and more exciting. Relevancy is an important topic for us given the scale of operations – we currently provide services in 216 countries and sell over 100M IPs while offering 24/7 service reliability.
🔵 Technology, engineering, and challenges – Is it a golden ratio for tech employees?
Yes, I tend to agree. Times have passed when you could impress potential employees with the latest hardware. For tech people to feel appreciated is to create conditions for personal growth, trying new things, and bringing new ideas to keep boredom away.
Tech talent wants to contribute, to have colleagues that support them throughout, and probably most importantly – they want to solve challenges that expand their knowledge base. People naturally want to grow. What makes you thrive as an employer is providing talent with challenges and tools so they can achieve personal growth.
🔵 How do you maintain this golden ratio? What are the management challenges?
The management challenges are relatively small. Most of the management at Oxylabs has a technology background, so they have faced similar challenges and know both inefficiencies and best practices. Specifically, in engineering teams, we thrive in a feedback culture. We listen to people, help them remove any roadblocks, and welcome all internal initiatives.
This lets us make fast decisions and allows pivoting from one technology to another if engineers are looking for a change of pace. Some examples might be switching from PHP to Golang, React.js to Node.js, Python or Django to Fast API. The best thing is the absence of a lengthy approval process – in most cases, only the Project Manager’s or Tech Lead’s approval is needed before an engineer can change the tech they’re working with, as long as it will do its job and is stable.
🔵 And what about quality & customer satisfaction? What part does it play in product development?
Quality and customer satisfaction are interrelated and cannot be separated, as we are a product-led company. At Oxylabs, we employ dedicated teams for parts of the product life cycle. Technology, product metrics, product-market strategy, sales, and all other relevant fields – these are all just pieces of a single puzzle. Our people stand united and motivated to deliver the very best possible product.
It is reflected by our Trustpilot rating of 4.7 with over 300 reviews from paid customers. Since we are led by our product and not necessarily the market, user feedback is crucial. The e-commerce self-service world is harsh, and customers tend to turn away if they are not happy. When thinking about our delivery to the end-user, we always strive to make it as user-friendly as possible.
Check out Oxylabs’ career page and open positions:
Founded in Sweden in 2016, Favro is a collaborative planning platform for fast-growing SaaS and live games companies. They raised $4.3 million in seed funding at the end of 2021, led by pan-Baltic venture capital fund Practica Capital and followed by Scale Capital and serial entrepreneur Christopher Beselin. Previous investors Inbox Capital and Creandum, an early investor in Spotify, also participated in the round.
The investment will help Favro scale its Lithuanian office, which will be the global center for marketing, sales, account management, and agile advisory. Edvinas Vosylius, Chief Sales Officer at Favro, told us everything you need to know.
🔵 Let’s start the interview by briefly discussing the product itself. We have all used Trello/Asana/Scoro/Notion/pick-your-productivity-tool. Why do teams around the world need another productivity app? How Favro differs from others?
Favro was created by industry veterans. They previously built Hansoft, a successful platform for agile software development, which is used by large companies in telecom, defence, electronics, and game development. Today, startups, enterprises, and game developers are all becoming SaaS businesses. Favro’s founders realised that to stay competitive, these companies have to make the whole organisation agile, not just development.
Favro was designed to tackle these challenges with collaborative agile planning that allows all teams to stay in sync autonomously. Executives and managers can apply a modern approach to leadership – be facilitators managing the flow of work rather than micromanagers of tasks.
🔵 Favro launched in Sweden back in 2016. Where are you today?
At the moment, Favro has more than 1500 clients, including world-renowned brands such as Wolt, Xbox, Disney, SAP and EA. Our team is only 26 people with international talent from 6 different countries.
🔵 In addition to HQ in Sweden, Favro already has offices in Vietnam & Ukraine, and now you are expanding to Lithuania. How did Favro find Lithuania and you as the head of its global sales operations?
In order to build an international team and attract multinational tech companies as clients, one needs a global network.
I met Patric Palm, CEO & Founder of Favro, in 2017 at one of Rotary’s global events. We kept in touch afterwards, and I found myself discussing SaaS and global expansion with Patric in December 2019. It turned out that my experience and Favro’s needs matched perfectly. Now, our Lithuanian office already has 8 employees.
🔵 Why do you think Vilnius is the best place for a new office out of all the potential options?
Vilnius has a unique community of young, ambitious, experienced, yet humble professionals. The local talent is appreciated due to their business mindset and strong drive. The work done over the past decade to develop the startup ecosystem shows tangible results, but there’s always room to improve.
🔵 Patric Palm, Founder and CEO of Favro, said that the Vilnius office launch coincides with a shift from “organic growth to more structured organisation development”. Could you expand on what that means?
For the first three years, Favro’s growth was solely led by the product, with the help of some social media marketing. The company didn’t have a team for sales and account management.
However, we noticed that both enterprises and startups were eager to speak with us since the product builds upon deep agile management thought-leadership. They want to learn straight from the experts before buying the product. So, we developed a new strategy to support global growth with a team for sales, account management and product/agile advisory based in Lithuania.
We are also recruiting more developers, but that team is fully remote so brilliant candidates for those positions can really live anywhere.
Favro’s go-to-market leadership team. From the left: Edvinas Vosylius, Chief Sales Officer, Patric Palm, CEO & Founder, and Jarune Preiksaite, Chief Marketing Officer.
🔵 How do you plan to build those teams out? What are your plans to attract top talent to join the company?
The Favro Lithuania team already has eight full-time employees. They were headhunted for their already proven brilliant skills. I build teams on the highest level of trust, where the right attitudes, drive, and ability to work autonomously is more important than a long CV.
Stock options are a key part of our talent attraction efforts. Once they have passed the trial period, every employee is included in our stock options program. This way, everyone is personally invested in the growth of the company – If Favro grows, the value of stock options grows as well.
The third reason for top talent to consider joining Favro is the possibility to work directly with senior leaders at Fortune 500 clients and hyper-innovative companies using Favro. There are not many startups in Lithuania where you could close deals with Electronic Arts, Amazon, Xbox, Wolt, SAP or Tobii. It’s one thing to close SMB customers, but working with globally recognised brands is a totally different experience.
🔵 Who are you hiring at the moment? What are the main qualities you look for in new people joining your team?
We follow the principle that “A-players” want to work with other “A-players”. So even though Favro’s team is only 26 people strong, our results look like we had an army. We operate with a very flat organisation where everyone is trusted with a lot of autonomy to manage their work in alignment with company objectives.
At the moment, we are looking for Sales Development Representatives, Account Executives, Account Managers, Marketing Specialists, e.g., Content Managers, Digital Media Specialists (PPC). We especially value candidates with experience working with agile methods and/or at a startup. Gamers are extra welcome – We would love to hear what games you like to play.
🔵 And the final question. I know that you officially opened Favro’s Lithuanian office only recently, in autumn 2021, but where do you think it will be in the next 2-3 years?
The plan for the Lithuanian office was to hire a top team of sales and marketing professionals and raise a successful seed round by the end of 2021. We successfully reached those goals. This year, the Favro Lithuania office will grow to 20 people and then we will go full speed towards an IPO in a few years.
Team of Favro Lithuania with CEO & Founder Patric Palm (in the middle).
It goes almost without saying that scaling an organisation by 10x is difficult. Maksim Grigorjev, a Senior Enterprise Architect at Adform, offered us an inside look at the growth journey of the tech team in the adtech industry.
He answered our questions ranging from working with massive datasets and managing microservices to dividing work between a 200 people strong tech team and maintaining a healthy technical community inside a large organisation.
🔵 How would you describe Adform as a product for the people outside the adtech industry?
Adform is a technology powering the open internet – a modern and effortless digital-advertisement toolkit enabling the publishers to effectively monetize their ad space and advertisers to reach the most relevant audience.
🔵 You have spent almost 12 years at the company. Do you remember why you chose to join in the first place?
From the early days of my professional career, I always enjoyed data-design and data-processing related tasks the most. With each subsequent position, I focused more and more on the data-related topics, accumulating practical experience as well as building a theoretical foundation from books and papers. Tools and approaches used in data-related tasks differ highly based on the size and amount of the data.
Twelve years ago, there weren’t that many companies in Lithuania working with data warehouses of such a massive scale. After the first interview, I already knew that it was a perfect match for my technical area of interest and a great learning opportunity. Time has shown that data is not the only interesting technical challenge that Adform provides, but it was the one that lured me in.
🔵 During your time in Adform, the organisation has grown rapidly and continues to do so. How much has your business and team grown over the past 10-12 years? How has it felt inside the company?
Currently, I have the privilege to work with ten times more colleagues compared to when I joined the company. Our technical stack likely has grown even more during those years. As one of the first scrum masters in the company, I also saw the company-wide agile transformation first-hand, which was a major cultural shift and a great learning opportunity.
It has been a compelling experience to see the company reimagining itself and adjusting to both the organizational and technical challenges that come with rapid growth. Making mistakes is unavoidable, and not all approaches work out in the end, so you learn to value flexibility, experimentation and not being afraid of failing fast. Rapid growth also means that you need to learn how to onboard new teams and work effectively on the same product in parallel with a much greater capacity.
We also had to change our architecture to reflect the changes in the organisation. For example, moving away from monoliths towards microservices came naturally because, otherwise, dependency management and work parallelization would’ve become too painful and error-prone. We learned the hard way that microservices alone do not give sufficient productivity boost if not supported by the powerful internal platforms taking care of cross-cutting concerns in a unified way.
🔵 How large is your technical organisation at the moment? How have you divided the work between teams?
Dev & IT is around 200 people now, split into four development groups, an IT department and several supporting teams. Each development group is responsible for the specific horizontal layer of our product (high load, big data, business application and web) and supported by the dedicated solution architect.
We made a conscious decision to organize our teams around a specific layer or a platform (instead of a product). For example, all our domain APIs are owned by the same development group and all client-facing user interfaces by another group. This approach allows our developers to specialize and excel in a reasonably small set of technologies and find common, consistent and highly reusable solutions to the same technical challenges across all of our products.
The IT department is responsible for our physical infrastructure, internal cloud platform, databases, security and multiple centralized DevOps services (monitoring, logging, deployment pipelines, etc.).
🔵 As a senior-level enterprise architect, you are constantly thinking about the big picture. What unique challenges does working at adtech offer to developers?
Adtech as an industry is quite challenging and very fast-paced. It’s still in its early days, very open to innovation and the product landscape changes every year.
Market participants are constantly finding more and more effective ways to collaborate and provide the end-user with the most relevant, optimized and engaging advertisement. The majority of market participants are both integration partners and competitors. On the one hand, you need to be well-connected and maintain compliance with industry standards, but at the same time also distinguish yourself from the competition. It is also a highly regulated industry with an emphasis on privacy, which puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders to keep the data safe, correct and protected against fraud.
All this allows developers to work on a portfolio of products not isolated from the outer world but highly integrated with clients, partners, exchanges, vendors and data providers. Industry standards also require constant evolution, and it is not uncommon for our lead engineers to take an active role in the industry working groups shaping them.
🔵 Could you give us a sense of the scale of datasets Adform’s products use? What challenges come with it?
We crossed the petabyte-scale threshold a while back and every day we process tens of billions of new transactions. This scale requires careful consideration in designing how the data is loaded, transported, processed, aggregated and queried. It also raises complexity in testing the pipelines, handling spikes, recovering from failures and ensuring the high availability and predictable latencies.
At its core, we use technologies that are well-known in the industry and have a proven track record to perform well in big data environments (Kafka, Hadoop, Storm, Spark, Vertica, Aerospike, etc.) with components written in-house for data loading, transformation, aggregation and query generation.
At such scale, it is not possible to dump all raw, unstructured data in one place and use it as a source for real-time, end-client reporting or augmenting the user interface with relevant KPIs. Therefore we invest a lot in cleansing, structuring and pre-processing the data to push as many calculations upfront as possible.
We also carefully design effective aggregates which would give sufficient flexibility and predictable querying latencies to the end client, but at the same time preserve enough row-level data for offline analysis or asynchronous exports.
🔵 How many microservices do you have? What’s your approach to developing and maintaining them?
We have several thousand deployable units – the exact number changes as new units are developed, and old ones are put on the path for deprecation.
Newer services are all based on the same tech stack, deployed as containers, and utilize central platform services, like monitoring, logging, alerting, deployment pipelines, etc. We aim to offload all repeatable or cross-cutting concerns into centralized platform offerings to make sure we solve the issues once and then apply them consistently. We also aim to minimize the boilerplate in new service development and ideally have developers focus explicitly on the business logic.
Our products have always been quite interconnected, so we struggled to find a common approach for data exchange between domain-private data stores and data synchronization between microservices. As a result, we invested in building an internal data distribution platform with all business domains exposing their public contracts by default without any change in the service itself. All consumers interested in a particular dataset can subscribe to the change streams exposed from those domains and build local read models of that data.
🔵 We have talked about data and back-end infrastructure quite a lot. However, for the end-user, a well-designed interface is also a must. How has Adform managed designing web applications?
User-experience and effective workflows are indeed very important for end-users as it directly impacts their productivity. Quite often, it is a deciding factor between our products and others.
Historically, we struggled with multiple segregated web applications which all looked somewhat similar but always had a slightly different look & feel and inconsistent feature sets. Three years ago, we realised this approach leads nowhere, so we decided to replace ~80 web applications with one new and modern application rewritten and redesigned from scratch. All user workflows are now based on a single framework, a single library of components and follow consistent functional patterns and design stereotypes. It was a highly rewarding project that received positive feedback from our users, gained industry recognition, and eventually won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award.
🔵 And finally, we heard in a previous interview that Adform people share a special vibe. How would you describe the company culture inside the technical organization?
I think there are a few factors why we have an open, positive and friendly technical community:
Even though we have more than one product in our portfolio, all of those are interconnected and often offered as a package to the end client. As a result, all the teams feel that they contribute to the common goal, eliminating the internal competition.
Customer success and product organizations work closely with development to get input from the developers and also pass along feedback about new features. This is crucial for the technical organization to feel like a fundamental part of the company and maintain the feedback loop between your effort and the results.
Using a common stack of technologies allows our developers to contribute to projects, features or incidents outside their direct ownership. This grows developers’ overall domain knowledge, expands the social circles and also cross-pollinates ideas and best practices across the organisation.
We hold regular tech talks where the technical community shares the insights, challenges and lessons from the latest component developments.
Let’s be honest, moving to another country or just choosing a new career path is not an easy taskand raises a lot of questions. But no worries, we are here to help. 💪
New set of empowering features have been launched in MeetFrank recruitment app 👀, which allows users to anonymously ask questions about the position/location, discover certain job markets and apply for positions under 60 seconds. Because we simply believe that talent is borderless and career possibilities should be transparent. 🚀
Putting statistics aside for a moment, there’s no better source of information than personal experience. Lithuania has been discovered by a number of talented people. And now it’s time to meet with four of them.
A big THANK YOU👏 to the amazing four! Also, we would like to thank Work in Lithuania – this article was made in collaboration with them.
Meet our four experts that shared their thoughts about Lithuanian job market with us.
💣 Why did they decide to continue their career in a small Baltic country? What’s their career story? Continue reading to find out more!
British girl Ffion
From Leicester, a picturesque Cathedral town in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, Ffion Quick first heard about Lithuania from some Lithuanian students she was studying with at university. Little did she know that she’d be furthering her career there in a few short years.
What inspired you to move to Lithuania?
First and foremost, I wanted to come on an adventure. When I was in university, I met amazing Lithuanian students and their grasp of IT was just out of this world. So, that made me start researching Lithuania a bit more and I realised that it was promoting itself as a tech hub.
So you were aiming for the IT sector. What career path did you choose?
I’m a UX Writer at Wix.com, which means I write all the text you see on the interface when you build a website with Wix.com. But it’s not only writing text, it’s programming all the stuff in the backend to make sure the user is able to see that text on the screen. So, it’s the best of both worlds. I get to be a copywriter and I also get to be a developer. I’m getting to meet people from all around the world too.
Lithuania is pretty far from the UK. What was the recruitment process like?
It was straightforward and difficult. I had to do a task, which I spent two days doing, and that was really good practice for what the job would be like when I came here. Then I had a video interview with HR in Vilnius. Then I had to go through two more interviews with my colleagues in Israel. Then finally they flew me out to Vilnius, and I had a face to face interview and then after that they said I had the job, so that was crazy!
Is there anything that you discovered about Lithuania before moving there that stuck in your head?
When I was researching interesting facts about Lithuania, I stumbled upon one that said there were more hot air balloons than people, which now that I’m here I don’t think is actually true. To see that amount of hot air balloons over the city is breath-taking.
Salvatore from San Francisco
Salvatore Riniolo hails from California 🇺🇸, near San Francisco, where he went to school and has lived for the last six years. Mesmerised by video games and the worlds they open, he wanted to develop games from a young age. Now he manages art content for Unity, one of several major game engine developers in the world.
San Francisco to Lithuania, and not the other way around. What’s your story?
Once the department, where I was managing my team, started shifting to Europe, I was tasked with building a team here, in Vilnius. Since I hadn’t travelled much before that, having spent my whole life in that little area in California, I had a dream to see a lot more of Europe and other countries.
You probably did not know a lot about Lithuania in advance?
I feel like my knowledge of geography when it comes to Europe was just a blank slate. I learned about Lithuania about a year and a half ago when I was told I would be building a team here. I had no idea what to expect, but I quickly fell in love with Vilnius. While some of the more modern areas of the city remind me of big cities in the U.S., there’s also a very European feel to the Old Town here, with all of these different architectural styles mixed together. I just love it!
Also, since I’m a big fan of street art, I really like Užupis – it’s beautiful, and it just seems really fun to be in that neighbourhood. And no – I don’t care if it’s an expat stereotype to like Užupis!
Have you noticed any differences between the people in Vilnius and your peers back in San Francisco?
I think Lithuanians tend to be a little quieter than I’m used to, but that’s not a bad thing. The people on my team are incredibly hardworking, and there’s a different culture of communication here. I find that I don’t need to follow up as much or to micromanage what my teammates are doing. Given how direct Lithuanians are, there’s not much beating around the bush or sugar-coating anything. I appreciate that.
The work-life balance here is another thing I really appreciate. Lithuanians focus significantly more on spending time with family, taking days off, celebrating holidays, and simply enjoying themselves when not at work. It feels a lot better, and it’s a big reason why I wanted to move
The true citizen of the world – Katya
Originally from Belarus🇧🇾and having spent four years in Budapest in her teenage years, Katya realised that home is not where you were born, it’s where you feel good. And for the last six years, this feel-good place has been Lithuania.
You’ve been living in Lithuania for quite some time now. What was your path to where you are today?
Yeah, it’s been six years already! After living in Hungary as a teenager with my parents, I knew that I wouldn’t want to be tied to just one place or country. After graduating from high school, I came to study Marketing and Global Business at Vilnius University. The studies were in English, and I had the chance to go to Portugal twice – for ERASMUS and to do an internship. Despite that, when deciding where to settle after studies, Vilnius was my first choice. I don’t know, it just felt cosy, plus the culture here is not that distant from what I was used to in Belarus. So, after several months of job hunting, I landed a position at Booking.com. I’ve been working there for the last one and half years.
Are you in the same position as you started?
I started as a CS Partner Specialist, working with accommodation providers on the platform. When an opportunity came to rise to the position of Quality Advisor in the same department, I took it. My team was nothing but helpful and supportive, and the transition was very smooth.
You’ve had quite the international experience in your life. How does the Lithuanian culture compare to what you’ve experienced elsewhere?
One thing about Lithuanians I can say for sure is that they’re open and reachable. If you have some issues – and who doesn’t when moving to a new country! – they’re more than willing to help. And if in other places people tend to be more focused on themselves and their inner circles, Lithuanians are much more communicable.
Harvard alumni Ruta
With a diploma of the prestigious Harvard Law School in her hands, Rūta🇱🇹could choose from a long list of job offers from around the world. However, she chose to develop her career in Lithuania. Now, she works for Revolut, a challenger bank that has already changed the way millions around the world perceive the future of banking.
Could you tell us a little bit about your professional journey?
I was born and grew up, like my whole generation, in exciting times. I had the chance to watch my country go through many transformations. I observed my mother set up a business in a new, already post-Soviet environment. After highschool I entered the Faculty of Law at Vilnius University. While still studying, I started working for Transparency International, and worked there for almost seven years. During my career there, I started dreaming that I would like to study some more. I chose to study for a Master’s degree at Harvard Law School.
Harvard was an amazing experience. I met extremely interesting people from all over the world, and I was taught by a number of people who were my heroes – for example, Cass Sunstein, an icon of behavioral economics, Samantha Power, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Noah Feldman, one of the most famous US constitutional law experts.
What were your initial plans after your studies? What helped you decide to further develop your career in Lithuania?
I considered the possibility of staying in the USA after graduating to gain some professional experience. Still, I enjoyed living in Lithuania, so I became interested in professional opportunities here. Finally, I received an offer to work in Lithuania at Revolut, a world-famous startup, a career many of my classmates at Harvard dreamed of.
Lithuania is a great place for a career because it is easier to be noticed and build a professional reputation here than in large countries, where the competition for any job is much higher. In my case, my current manager just heard about me from former co-workers and contacted me to ask if I was interested in career opportunities. Something like this could hardly be expected in a big city like London or New York.
It is also easier to gain the trust of the employer – I see a lot of examples when young specialists receive a high level of trust from managers and have the opportunity to work really interesting jobs and grow professionally. Meanwhile, abroad, a young professional of my age is usually just a small cog in a large organisation, where climbing the career ladder takes a lot of time.
Isn’t Vilnius too small for an ambitious person like yourself?
I view Vilnius as a compact rather than a small city. It can offer almost everything (if not everything) a larger European city can, just at a smaller scale. There is no need to spend hours in traffic jams here, and you can easily escape to nature even if you live in the city centre. The nearest pine forest is a 15-minute drive away from my house – so if I want to get a fresh breath of air and clear my mind after a long day at work, I easily find time to do so.
Startups, as often portrayed in pop culture, require a lot of passion for work, but in Lithuania it is easier to strike a balance between work and leisure – unlike, for example, in New York, there is no need to commute an hour to work on the subway, so you can have much more time to yourself. Personally, I try to maintain my exercise routine, and I can manage having very precise appointments with my trainer, because I can get from one place to another very fast.
When choosing a career path, we all consider many elements – from personal life to the kind of career we want to create and where is the best environment for that. When choosing a place for professional career development, it is worth not forgetting that there are many international businesses in Lithuania, as well as interesting opportunities in the field of public policy and the non-governmental sector. When working here, it is possible to enjoy the already mentioned advantages – the compactness of cities, nature, fresh air, the fact that it is easier for young people in Lithuania to earn trust and start doing really interesting things at work. I believe that after considering all this, Lithuania, as a place for career development, ranks on an equal footing with other countries in the world, often outweighing them.
Want to know more about possibilities in 🇱🇹?
Lithuania is an unique mixture of great opportunities to work at international companies, where you can kick-start your career with less time and less hassle. If you’re interested in knowing more, then get the MeetFrank recruitment app to discover the local job market & to start a new path in your career.
More info for companies that are hiring can be found here.
This article is based on data from MeetFrank Job Market Insights. For additional and per-track reports, visit this page.
In the past few months, Lithuania has been recovering from the effects of the pandemic. Lately,new travel restrictions have been introduceddue to the increasing case numbers in Europe.😷
If you are planning to travel to Lithuania and coming from one of the countries that is subject to the 14-day quarantine – just like Germany – be aware in the first place! ✈
Want to hear more news from the Lithuanian job market and interested in learning more about job opportunities in the country? If so, let’s keep reading! 👀
Job Market Overview
In the previous report, what really stood out was the fact that the number of job openings increased by 63% compared to July. This was a pretty good sign that the Lithuanian economy is recovering. 🙏
So what is the data showing this month?
👉 The number of job openings did not change much in the 4 weeks from mid-August to mid-September. 🤔
On the other hand, the first week of September saw the biggest increase. 📈
👉 How is the number of job applications doing?
Apparently, it has made a leap since mid-August. Thesecond week of September saw the highest increase. This shows the job seekers are back in town. 🤓
And here is some good news! Finding a job in Lithuania is at the ‘OK level’. This is much better compared to the situation in Estonia and Finland. 🤩
If you are a software engineer, you will find it very easy to get a job in Lithuania. 💪
Both the offered and expected salaries have seen an increase in September. The job seekers seem to have adjusted their salary expectations. 💶
💡 The gap between both salaries have been stable since the beginning of August.
Top 6 Specialties with the Most Openings
Are you actively looking for a job? Is Lithuania the country where you want to continue developing your career?
Here are the top 6 specialties offering the highest number of job openings! 👇
Similar to Estonia and Finland, the Software Engineering specialty is the most active one when it comes to hiring new talent. If you are a software engineer, don’t miss out on the job openings from the Lithuania-based companies! 🍀
Software Engineering is followed by the Marketing & PR & Media and Sales & Business Development. Especially good news for the Marketing people – they have not seen such a demand for a long time.
While Customer Support is in 4th place, Data & Analytics and IT & Sysadmin have the same number of openings closing the list in joint 5th place.
Data & Analytics has hardly found a spot in the list in Estonia and Finland as well.
Compared to the rest of the list, Software Engineering is by far the most active specialty nowadays.
Salaries Offered by Employers: September vs January 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has stirred the economy worldwide. So, what about the offered salaries in Lithuania? Let’s check how the numbers have changed since January.
👉The offered salaries have been on the rise for all industries except for IT & Sysadmin. Unfortunately, this sector saw a decrease of 25%.
👉 Data & Analytics and Software Engineering saw the highest increase. 💶
👉 Marketing & PR & Media saw the lowest increase. But no worries, Marketing people! The winds have changed. 🌬
Now that the companies operating in this sector are more active, chances are your salary in your new job may be even higher than you expected. 💰
👉 Overall, employers are ready to pay more in order to find the best talent for their companies.
Companies with the Most Remote Options
Lithuania is a startup heaven and there are lots of companies waiting for the best talent and that are open for remote workers!
Let’s delve into the list of the companies with the most remote working options. 🚀
🏆 And the remote working Oscar goes to AdKings, an industry leading ecommerce Facebook ads growth agency. If you are working in the Marketing industry (oh you lucky Marketing people🍀), check out their job openings in the MeetFrank app.
Second place goes to Vegvisir, an IT company based in Vilnius. If you are looking for a job in the IT sector, this could be your chance. ✌️
Starting from third place, the companies in the rest of the list offer the same number of remote options. Smart Brands Laboratory LLC, Indigroup, and KEVIN make up the top 5 along with the companies mentioned above.
So, what is this list telling us?
💡The most active industries in the Lithuanian job market for remote workers are Marketing, FinTech, HR, and SaaS.
💡 Also, based on what we have shared in the previous sections, Marketing has become very popular as of mid-September.
Welcome to the MeetFrank Family!
Recently, we welcomed new members to the MeetFrank family: Tubuva, UAB Cgates, UAB Dayton, Newcrush, Scale3C, Blue Solutions UAB, Pinokis Corporation, FlowForma,Precizika Metrology UAB, Book Lovers, Nsoft, and UAB “Biomedikos centras”. 🥁
Recent months saw a stagnation in the number of job openings and applications in Lithuania, which was more or less the same situation all around the world. 🌍
This week, we have some good news. Are you ready? 😉
If so, let’s start with the job market overview and how things have changed since the beginning of July. 🤓
Job Market Overview
After a 3-month period of ups and downs, August started with some good news from the Lithuanian job market.
As of today, the number of job openings has increased by 63% compared to July 1. 📈
What about the number of job applications? Have job seekers followed the same trend as companies?
Well, not really. There has been a drop in the number of applications lately. The reasons for that might be:
👉 The openings may not match with the expectations and needs of active job seekers.
👉 Job seekers may be enjoying a much-needed rest this summer.
Let’s jump into the market competitiveness stats.
More job openings combined with lower applications result in a less challenging market competitiveness level in the Lithuanian job market. Nowadays, it’s at the “OK level” to find a job in Lithuania.
If you’re a software engineer, it’ll be even easier for you. 😉
And what about average salaries?
There has been a slight decrease both in the average expected and offered salaries. Even though they got a bit closer this week, apparently job seekers and companies are not quite on the same page — the offered salaries are still higher than the expected salaries.
Top 6 specialties with the most applications in July
Similar to Estonia and Finland, Software Engineering has been the most popular industry in the Lithuanian job market in July.
In the chart above we can see that Marketing & PR & Media has found a place in the top 3, just like in Estonia.
It seems the pandemic has affected Customer Service a lot, as nowadays the number of applications in this area has decreased a bit.
So, who couldn’t make it to the top 6 list? It’s the Design industry. 🤷 It did make 6th place in the Finnish job market report which you can read here.
This might be related to the low number of openings as well as design professionals being happy with their current jobs. It would be worth checking how this progresses in the next report. 😉
Top 10 companies with the most replies to applicants in July
In this report, we’ll find out which Lithuanian companies have been doing a good job when it comes to replying to applicants.
🥁 The champion is Vertex, a creative product development company. On behalf of all job seekers; thank you Vertex, for being so kind and replying to your applicants. 🌟
2nd place goes to Indigroup, an expert consulting company, and 3rd place to KEVIN, an innovative fintech company. 💪
When we have a look at the rest of the list, we can see that the Finance and Software Development industriesare leading the way.
Companies with the most openings in July
We have talked about the most popular industries, the companies with the most replies and now it’s time to switch to another ‘most’ and discuss the most active companies with the highest number of openings in July.
Do some of the companies remind you of something? Maybe you can already recall some of them from the list of ‘kind’ companies with the most replies to applicants?
We also thought so. 🤓
First place goes to Tesonet, “a proud creator and investor of over 30 various global products and projects” in their own words. It seems the company is growing and now in need of more and more talent.
The list continues with UAB Teltonika and Indigroup which you can remember from the previous section. Their number of openings go hand in hand with their kindness. 🤩
4th place goes to Amston, a recruitment company, followed by Intrum Global Business Services, a market leader in credit management services, and world-renowned Lithuania-born website Bored Panda.
The rest of the list shows are that the most active industries in July have been Media Publishing, Recruitment, and Software Development.
Welcome to the MeetFrank family!
A new week, new members! 👯 Say ‘hi’ to our new members: Worksober.com, UAB FinoMark, Antler Group UAB, UAB Business Group, Cardinity, Attention Insight, UAB “ELDK”, and UAB Slapto pirkėjo tyrimai (DIVE LIETUVA).
