Valens review from a happy engineer :)

The soul of Pangea.ai’s brand is making human connections. Our tech partners continue to build and strengthen our community’s DNA. We are very proud to have Valens as part of our circle, whose unique individuals now inspire and empower all of our team members.

Time to meet the Backend Engineer at Valens, Lejla!

What do you like most about Valens?

I like the projects, people and atmosphere! I feel like we have a lot of interesting projects with different tech stacks, it's always interesting to share problems and learnings with eachother. Also, I feel like there is no hierarchy and it's easy to raise any problems or day to day difficulties you encounter, and you will be met with understanding.

I also think Valens has a strong team of engineers which makes it easy to share experiences and learn from others.

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Why did you join Valens, and what has kept you here?

I joined the company because a colleague of mine from a previous company told me that they were searching for new backend engineers. I was a that point working on a stagnating project where tasks got too similar with time and I was ready to find something new.

I liked the interview process, as well as the transparency of the directors about switching technologies and finding the perfect project for me - which I found within my first few months at Valens.

Before, I was working mostly on enterprise projects with a big hierarchy where it was hard to switch teams, not to say projects. Now I am working for an ecommerce startup which is at a really interesting phase of growth where you encounter interesting performance and architectural questions and I am able to learn a lot, as well as to contribute with my previous experience.

What have you gained from working at Valens?

I have gained the possibility to work with people with a lot of experience which all have had interesting career paths. We have a very nice community and have Discord channels that we use for sharing new and interesting blogs, technolgies or have debates on why certain approaches are better than others etc.

We have a great community of people where you can share opinions and questions and get interesting and valuable responses.

What are your primary responsibilities and what does your day-to-day look like?

I am currently employed as a Full Stack (main focus on Backend) Engineer for an ecommerce startup. I have been working on that project for almost two years and I was the 5th engineer in a team that now counts around 25-30 engineers. It was very interesting to see both the team and project grow in that period.

Because of my knowledge about the system, in the past months I switched to a sub-team which focuses on L3 support, as well as adding tools and means for the L1 and L2 to do their tasks. This includes everything from adding tools to get different kinds of analysis on the current processes in the system, do certain actions in bulk, or releasing some features 'silently' for certain customers.

Before that, I was working on the development of the core service that is communicating with our microservices as well as 3rd party systems

Visiting my favorite museum :)

What did you want to be when growing up?

When I was in school I thought I will be a mathematics teacher, that was the one and only thing I enjoyed in school. However in the last years of high school I had my first encounter with programming and seeing how similar they are I also started liking programming. After looking into programming a bit, seeing that the curriculum contains a lot of mathematics it was easy to choose Computer Science and Programming as my field of studies :)

What drew you to engineering? Have you always worked in backend development roles?

When I was searching for my first job, I would have preferred to work as Frontend engineer, but I somehow first ended up as a mobile Xamarin engineer. I liked that position, but because of no code review culture on my first job, I decided to leave my job and start something new.

The company I was interested at that moment offered me a Backend engineer position because they were starting a very interesting big data project and needed a Java and Scala junior engineer position. I was interested in the project, but also the company culture seemed a good fit and during that project I really liked the challenges a backend engineer encounters during daliy work. I especially enjoyed performance optimisation tasks and everything related to fine tuning and improving processes within the system. I was there for few years and learned a lot.

When I started at Valens I was applying for a full stack position, because during my previous experience I also had some tasks and smaller projects done in React.js. and I wanted to improve my skills. I got the opportunity to work as a Full stack engineer with a bit bigger focus on backend - that is what I currently work with and I really enjoy it!

Get to know Lejla and the rest of the Valens team!

We’re delighted that Lejla decided to join Valens – it’s been great having them on board! If you have any questions or want to get to know Lejla or one of their colleagues from the Valens team, we can put you in touch. Don’t hesitate to reach out!