I’d like to take this as an opportunity to share my story of how I found my perfect company, and some tips for those who may find themselves looking for their next career adventure.
Find your sweet spot
It might sound obvious, but it all starts with what you actually want. I can’t stress this enough, but in order to find the perfect match, you need to have a pretty good idea of what continuously gets you excited every Monday morning.
When I started looking for my next job, I penciled down the following: “work as a developer for an international startup in its growth phase that has demonstrated product market fit in an exciting industry and that puts the human at the centre of its business”. Since Cledara checked all the boxes, I knew I was off to a good start!
Embrace change
As you can see, my requirements were already quite specific (and it took me quite some time to narrow it down).
I underwent several career path changes as a continuous trial and error process each time discovering new areas and understanding better what I liked. That took me through engineering studies, investment banking, business-related positions in an aerospace company, before eventually settling on software development.
But this little career rollercoaster took me to some of the greatest European cities and I felt I was moving forward with each experience bringing me closer to fulfilment.
The right working environment
Working in a high-growth company brings challenges and excitement on a continuous basis and I was definitely looking for that fast-paced, stimulating environment.
However, that means a lot of uncertainty that can sometimes transform into friction and stress in the day-to-day if there’s no clear direction shared from leadership. And this is what I love about Cledara: not only is there a clear vision, but our founder and CEO Cristina has also from the very onset of her company set solid values such as trust that everyone can rely on to be confident in our decision making.
I believe this is the secret sauce to fostering a great working environment.
People, people, people
Of course all of this wouldn’t work without the right people around you.
In my view, this is a direct side-effect of having set a clear and understandable vision and values; it then becomes much easier to recruit the right people who are interested because they share the same values. I am glad that I’m surrounded by talented, empathic and fun colleagues that make this ride a great adventure.
That also meant for me being able to continue learning and grow fast since I can rely on people with knowledge that are readily available to share and transmit it.
The Product
This brings me to the slightly more specific part about my job as a backend developer at Cledara.
Growing fast means that there’s a constant stream of new projects to build from scratch. This is really exciting as you enjoy very high independence while being able to count on the support of the whole team for reviews or business expertise.
On the other hand, As Cledara has been in the market a few years already, the codebase offers solid foundations to support new developments which helps building new things faster.
There is also a high consideration for continuous improvement and it’s very stimulating to see, for example the move from vanilla JS to Typescript, the inclusion of more in-depth testing, or the evolution towards horizontal scaling.
There is much more that can be said but I invite you to contact me if you’d like to know more. And if you can relate to some of the above themes, you may be a great fit for Cledara.
.webp)
