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From Telerik Academy to VMware and then Leanplum

After graduating from Telerik Academy, Valeri worked as a software engineer at VMware for a couple of years and in 2017 joined Leanplum’s team in Bulgaria. Today, he is part of the Omni-channel Insights division, responsible for data analysis and user experience recommendations that are part of the company’s leading mobile marketing platform.

Confident Career Start
Valeri first became interested in programming at high school but chose “Networking Technologies” as his university major instead. With the help of Telerik Academy, he acquired the necessary knowledge and confidence to start his career in the software industry.

“Telerik Academy provides the perfect mix of theory and practice. The plethora of hands-on projects you work on throughout the program, is what makes the Academy stand out from other tech-ed organizations. Most of the assignments are group projects. This helps students get a firsthand experience of software developers’ day-to-day work.”

The wide variety of courses helped him build a strong knowledge foundation and attain practical experience, while choosing how to progress on his career path.

Skills for Life
From the skills acquired at Telerik Academy, he believes writing quality code and code testing are the most valuable to him.

"One of the biggest challenges in processing large data sets is how to replace module implementations without causing data distortion or loss. Creating reliable tests and quality code are both critical to the current state of the software we make, as well as the long-term development of the platform."

Work that Challenges You Every Day
Leanplum's mobile marketing platform allows leading global companies such as Grab, Tinder and others to create meaningful relationships with their users. Thus, the platform handles billions of events generating vast arrays of data. This, along with the use of the latest Big Data technologies is an exciting opportunity for Valeri.

"The company has enormous potential and works on a great scale. Our team faces various, extremely interesting engineering challenges on a daily basis. It's exciting to be responsible for important parts of the product and be able to add value and contribute to the customers’ needs. At Leanplum, I work with world-class professionals and I have the freedom to concentrate on things that are really interesting and meaningful to me."

Another key factor that attracted Valeri to the company's team is the flat structure of the engineering organization and the freedom and flexibility employees have.

"Our teams are structured in the so-called “pods”, which can be considered as autonomous internal startups within the large startup environment. This allows us to be independent and sometimes more efficient in terms of software development and results achieved. We work and grow together with clients who are world leaders in their areas. The opportunity to directly work on different business needs is an additional incentive for the team."

Friendly Work Environment
When asked what distinguishes Leanplum as an employer, Valeri points out five key elements: people, product, scale, culture and perks and benefits.

"Leanplum has an extremely strong team that helps you grow and maintains a friendly and collaborative environment. A proof for this are our whiteboard tech talks and All Hands Meetings where we openly discuss new technical solutions and architectures, as well as the company’s strategic plans. The transparency and strong corporate culture allow each member of the team to offer new ideas and participate in solving different challenges."



He also greatly appreciates the working conditions, perks and benefits the company provides to its employees.
 
“We have unlimited work from home time, additional days off, modern office located in the center, preorganized lunches and dinners with the team, individual budgets for trainings and many more. Another important part of Leanplum's culture is how it enables employees to own options from the company."

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