In conclusion, there’s a variety of job openings available for professionals with diverse skill sets. Whether you’re interested in transportation, finance, or technology, these companies offer competitive salaries and opportunities for growth.
Looking for new opportunities? Download MeetFrank– a mobile app for letting top companies apply to YOU.
iGaming company Betsson Group invites all FinTech professionals to a meetup on the 30th of March in Tallinn. Open to all curious professionals in the digital space and especially with experience in payments technology. Join the network!
Betsson Group’s FinTech Meetup on the 30th of March
Approximately 700 of 2200+ Betsson Group employees are tech and product professionals. With a strong global presence and revenue exceeding €777 million in 2022, Betsson Group continues active recruiting across all departments.
Interested in taking your FinTech experience to the next level? Take a look at their openings in MeetFrank:
Betsson Group, operating Betsafe and SuperCasino brands in Estonia, offers casino, sportsbook and other games. From a single slot machine in 1963, Betsson Group is now one of the largest companies within the global iGaming industry.
Year 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of Betsson Group – reflecting stability and company’s strong background. And it shows in the results. Despite the challenging market conditions in 2022, Betsafe delivered 15% growth. The profitability makes way for new investments in new markets and constant development of the tech platform.
The company mixes its heritage with a forward-looking and tech-savvy mindset. As the iGaming industry is ever-evolving, Betsson Group recently moved to a brand new office at the heart of Tallinn. When their first office was opened back in 2002, there was only one single employee. Only one! This has grown into 120(and constantly 📈) people, working mostly in the commercial and tech teams. Nevermind the 2200+ colleagues from 72 nationalities Betsson Group has at other locations.
Betsafe is also a loyal supporter of the local sporting scene. Sponsoring different sports disciplines, federations, leagues, and individual athletes. Lithuanian basketball league, Paide Linnameeskond, Ott Tänak – to name a few. Also one of the most legendary sports commentators Kalev Kruus hosts Betsafe Podcast.
At the SiGMA Europe 2022 Betsson Group won the Responsible Gaming of the Year Award for the second consecutive year. This category recognises industry leaders of safer gaming.
Perforce Software (previously ZeroTurnaround) is the leading provider of enterprise-scale software for technology developers and development operations teams. Their services are for teams who require productivity, visibility, and scale throughout all phases of the development lifecycle.
We interviewed Hannes Linno, Director of Software Engineering, who told us about the maturity of the DevOps field and how Perforce’s innovation helps developers around the world work smarter. Among other things, we talked about career opportunities in a team consisting mainly of senior level engineers and the challenges of developing a range of products in various stages of maturity.
🔵 ZeroTurnaround originally developed JRebel and XRebel before being acquired by Perforce back in 2017. What organisational changes, if any, did the acquisition bring as both products are still developed in Estonia?
After the acquisition, Estonia has become the European strategic development centre for Perforce, a talent hub for multiple products. In Estonia, we went from being a Java-only company to a company that offers tools for the entire DevOps cycle.
The acquisition brought organisational changes, as would be expected, but Rebels are still a key part of the Perforce family. However, the product portfolio here keeps growing, as does Perforce globally, via new acquisitions. Our newest acquisition is Puppet, a leading software configuration management tool.
🔵 As you mentioned, Perforce is building many products for the DevOps field. Before we dive into more details, could you clarify what you mean by DevOps in your context?
To answer this question, I would start with what it is not. In recent years there has been a huge increase in job openings for DevOps engineers. Sadly, it is often simply considered a nicer name for system and application administrators when more and more infrastructure orchestration is done via coding and scripting. In reality, DevOps is a wider area, so it is not simply taking care of servers and infrastructure on public clouds or on-premise infrastructure.
So, what is DevOps? It involves Development and Operations tools and processes covering the full spectrum of areas from product planning, development and quality control to execution and stability in production environments.
DevOps is totally focused on doing things smarter and automating wherever possible to have higher quality and shorter development cycles. While DevOps as an area includes both tools and processes, Perforce’s focus is on building the best tools that support DevOps processes.
Our product portfolio already covers all main phases of the DevOps cycle, so we have tools for planning, development, quality control and operating customer solutions.
🔵 How mature is the DevOps market currently and where it is heading in the next few years?
In software development, the digitalization wave is still picking up speed immensely. In Estonia, we are used to everything being digitalized, but the rest of the world is still lagging behind.
In the next several years, more and more traditional companies must increase their IT investments to keep up with stiff competition. To manage the extra complexity, companies that want to remain relevant in ten years must increasingly focus on the full cycle of the DevOps flow.
We can already see the huge gap in the available software engineering workforce and increasing demands will only add to the pressure. In addition to growing digitalization, the new emerging technologies like AI, virtual reality and quantum computing increase the complexity to the next level.
This means that development and operations must improve automation so that developers work smarter and spend less time doing repetitive tasks. Continuing in the same way as we have built software so far is not possible. There are simply not enough software engineers in the world.
At Perforce our focus is to build tools that aid software engineers (developers, QA, system administrators, and tech support) to decrease development time and ensure the quality of the results.
🔵 Who are the users of your products?
At Perforce, we are building tools for other engineers. I would say it is a unique opportunity because, often, we are solving problems that most developers, including ourselves, are facing.
Our engineers have access to all the tools we are building in-house, allowing our employees to work together across products to find insights and provide quick feedback on what to improve. Whether it is about the functionality, usability or simply the documentation that is available for using the products and tools. It also allows us to build the features that fill the gaps between our different products so that the full cycle of tools works together efficiently.
Having a wide selection of products in our portfolio enables us to focus on areas that otherwise could fall between different products or solutions, especially where the market is too small for anyone wanting to invest there. In other words, we fill the gaps to save our customers time, money and reduce stress!
When speaking to our candidates, we often hear that they are coming from industries where the company’s purpose is not interesting for them, or they don’t really understand the problem their product is trying to solve. In our case, it is the opposite: Most engineers love the area they are working in and are eager to have better tools that help them work smarter.
🔵 Let’s talk a little about your organisation. What best describes your engineering teams?
Our teams are mainly built around senior level engineers. The advantage is that even if a team member has been in the industry for 10 or 20 years, they still have interesting challenges and can continue their learning path, as they can discuss the issues and solutions with like-minded people. It allows our teams to be agile, move faster, make quicker decisions and have the greatest innovation potential.
We also try to focus our benefits package on senior engineers. The emphasis is on work-life balance and extra time off because we know how important it is to take time for yourself or spend it with your family and friends. Happy people are best positioned to create innovation.
People and teams have a lot of independence and trust. We also have flexitime where each person manages their own working time, and each team can agree what is the best work routine for their team, like how many meetings they want to have, what kind of meetings, how much office time and what are the team’s working hours in general.
🔵 What kind of technologies can one expect to work with when joining Perforce?
As we have a wide range of products in various stages of maturity, we offer interesting challenges for different tastes.
We have products (such as Gliffy) that are end-user facing, where the focus is on usability and clean design. Then we have products where developers must work on deep tech and solve problems on a very low level, close to operating system features, like Rebel products that interact with code on the compilation level, to make it smoother and faster to execute.
We also contribute a lot to open source communities by addressing all kinds of unexpected user cases and problems. In relation to open source, not many people know that Zend, the trusted tool for PHP developers, is also developed by us. And at the same time, specifically for the semiconductor industry, we are developing an IP lifecycle management solution – Methodics.
🔵 What kind of career opportunities does Perforce offer?
Having such a wide stack of technologies provides numerous opportunities for long term growth for our people. It is common that if an engineer would like to work on a different product or with a new tech stack, they will receive support from their managers on finding another project within Perforce.
The experience we have is that people with long tenure want to stay in the company, as they love our culture and benefits, but simply want a new challenge and continue improving their skillset. And the only opportunity is not just moving between projects and technologies – since we are growing rapidly, we also have many opportunities to grow from engineering roles to management roles.
Check out Perforce’s career page and open positions:
🔵 Could you briefly describe your hiring process? Do you have any tips to be successful in the process?
After an initial quick meet and greet on the phone with our recruiter, we typically have a more in-depth interview where we look for the technical knowledge needed for the position. Assuming that goes successfully, there is a meeting with the team and the direct manager.
My primary advice is to do your research about the product and the company. The interview process is not there to find your weaknesses, but rather to see where your skillset will best advance the Perforce vision. We are looking for people who are genuinely interested in our products and the problems they are there to solve.
Introducing VNTRS Estonia – Startup Studio & a VC fund enriching Northern Europe’s start-up world. Founded in Sweden in 2016, they have invested in 24 companies and worked with hundreds of others. Now they have also settled in the Estonian start-up scene. Using the Sweat Equity model & their VEQ fund to help companies grow, VNTRS is well connected with start-up hubs in the Baltics.
VNTRS has an attractive career path to offer for people who are invested in growing tech companies. And by ‘invested’, we mean both personal and professional growth. An employee investment possibility also comes with working at VNTRS, of course. Morgan Vernay, Senior Javascript Developer at VNTRS, enlightened us on sweat equity and their vision of collaborating with start-ups.
The Interview
🔵 Let’s bring everyone up to date on how VNTRS came about and how you are making the world a better place?
Our vision is the world where good ideas become successful. We believe that too many good ideas, passionate entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs fall short due to the wrong reasons – we are here to change this.
We build digital products and services while also helping start-ups get to the market cost-effectively. If we believe in the people and the companies we work with, we are willing to reinvest part of our fee to equity, become shareholders and long-term tech partners. Our investment portfolio currently consists of 24 early-stage tech companies that we’ve helped to build, and we have also worked with hundreds of clients following VNTRS’ values.
As mentioned above, we risk and benefit together with our partners. This is what the concept of VNTRS – Sweat Equity is all about. In 2021, we also started the VNTRS VEQ investment company to expand our investment capabilities. VEQ will invest in pre-seed and seed rounds with a mandate all over Europe but focus on the Nordics and Baltics. VEQ does not have a traditional fund structure and thus can remain a long term active owner as long as it makes sense for both sides.
🔵 How has the startup scene welcomed you here in Estonia?
Since opening up the Estonian office in February 2021, we have seen a lot of interest from Estonian and Baltic startups. We focus on introducing the Sweat Equity concept to the founders as this model was not well-known in Estonia in the past. Nowadays, we deliver the message and spread the work through the benefits of this model, connecting ourselves to VC funds, incubators, and accelerators.
We screen about ten start-ups weekly, asking the best ones to pitch for our Investment Committee. Collaboration with local ecosystem players helps us to guarantee a stable flow of incoming leads.
Within those 4 months of operation, we landed our first Sweat Equity project in Estonia, helped several companies with consulting, and managed to work on one additional cash project. As things stand, there are several more investment projects in the pipeline. That’s one of the reasons we are looking for additions to our team.
🔵 The ever-changing work environment at startups can be challenging for developers. What would you say are the main distinctions in work-life between VNTRS and startups?
I would somewhat disagree here. I have been researching this topic, and according to my research, developers primarily seek to switch jobs as they get tired of the same product development; they feel a lack of impact in decision making rather than just completing the set tasks. Also, as a start-up is growing, the “romance” of the work nature is disappearing.
In VNTRS, we offer the developers various projects with 100% involvement and freedom to achieve technical tasks. Developers can finish one (long or short-term) project and choose to have some other tasks in hand for the next one. We always involve our developers in workshops, scoping sessions, MVP mapping process, etc. Coding is just one part of a developer’s job.
🔵 Could you elaborate on how VNTRS’ lifecycle management helps to relieve common pain points found at start-ups?
Very often you will find developers only completing tasks assigned to them while being micromanaged at the same time. We strongly believe that involvement is vital to solving this issue, and we enable it through different means. First and foremost, we want our engineers and developers to feel like they impact the whole process of working with start-ups. We also believe that start-ups lack diversity in developers’ daily tasks.
For our engineers and developers to find solutions for our clients, we believe that a deep understanding of the start-up and its product is key for everyone involved. Getting this knowledge enables our engineers and developers to provide valuable input to our clients during the whole process. This allows our employees to work with external clients and our start-ups to widen their skill sets.
Last but not least, we feel like having a foot in the game motivates you to give your best. That is why we run our company using sweat equity. Every employee in the company can invest in the project they are working on.
🔵 Working at VNTRS means collaborating with multiple start-ups at once instead of choosing only one. How does it manifest itself in daily life?
This means that while you could be in the “coding” phase of a product for one start-up, you could also have part of your time attributed to screening potential new start-ups or helping others in our portfolio to scope their MVP.
Working at VNTRS as a Javascript developer, you can expect a lot of diversity in your daily tasks. We believe that developers and engineers are more than just good at coding. We value their input regarding the whole lifecycle of the products. Our clients appreciate the fact that they can count on VNTRS at all stages of the partnership and always have insightful interlocutors to help them solve their problems using the talent and experience of the whole team. Both Swedish and Estonian.
🔵 VNTRS also has a ‘sweat equity’ system in place, aiming to raise employee engagement even further. Could you give a brief overview of what it is and how it works?
Sweat equity means investing ‘sweat’ instead of money. We are giving out our consultancy and seek equity of the client-company in return. This model came to light in the 1930s in California, US. Back then, immigrants had no place to live and no money to buy an apartment. Local real estate developers approached them and offered a deal, ‘help us to build houses, and in return, as an alternative to the salary, we will give you an apartment, where you could live.’
VNTRS is doing the same by not seeking monetary compensation for the services but asking for equity instead. We can reinvest part of our fee back into the start-up and thus become a minor shareholder. This takes the collaboration to a higher level as we are directly interested in growing the start-up’s valuation.
A ‘killer feature’ of our company is that all of the employees invest part of their salary into the VNTRS fund. This means that all of the workers are shareholders of the project they are working on. The given system allows our workers to get engaged and have direct motivation for success while clients see us as trustworthy partners. We are not an outsourcing company, where the more hours you spend on the project, the more money you will earn. Sweat Equity is about growing together with our startups, as only then can VNTRS be successful!
🔵 When and why did VNTRS choose to use sweat equity? How does it impact a company’s working life, people & operation wise?
This was the decision from day one. In the beginning, it is surely risky and challenging as you need to find the right balance to be able to cover all the running costs, but VNTRS did play this right from the start.
Our experience shows that the Sweat Equity model is efficient and great for founders. We are now applying all the know-how gathered in Sweden to the Estonian market.
🔵 What are some of the qualities you’re looking for in new developers joining the team?
When it comes to hiring new developers, we look for pragmatic and self-acting people with a drive to become experts in their field of work and at working with start-ups. We look for people willing to produce clean quality code using recent and relevant technologies to help the start-ups in our portfolio grow.
In February, the most popular Estonian company on MeetFrank was Katana Smart Manufacturing Software. 👏
What does the company do? What are their plans for 2021? Who are they recruiting at the moment?Without further ado, let’s get to know our gold medalist.
Providing modern manufacturing & inventory software for scaling businesses, Katana is part of an industry that was strongly boosted by the pandemic. Staying at home and not being able to socialise has led to a higher amount of online shopping and higher need of e-commerce tools.
Enterprise planning software is one of the biggest individual software categories, yet the sector has seen the least innovation. In other words, the long-established market leading systems are like horses in the world of Teslas (no longer fulfilling the market needs).
The ability to support both D2C (direct-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) sales channels is crucial for emerging new manufacturing brands. This flexible integration is exactly the need of modern manufactures that Katana is catering.
Katana’s advantage is powered by its ability to provide smart manufacturing in a simpler way. According to CEO Kristjan Vilosius, their service is the world’s most self on-board-able manufacturing software.
🏆 Clarity in the company’s vision – catering to market needs by offering software for every manufacturer globally.
🏆 The simple self on-board-ability – being global from the start and bringing in an outstanding number of organic leads.
🏆 Stellar delivery – surpassing the goals with an ease (revenue growth, churn reduction etc).
Transitioning “making and crafting” into “manufacturing”
Katana’s mission in simpler terms is to find scaling manufacturers that are growing out of Excel and provide them with smart production planning software combined with inventory/warehouse management. Katana has stepped in to save modern growing manufacturers from taking the huge leap from spreadsheets to overly complex and expensive enterprise software.
As mentioned before, simpler and smarter is the magic formula.
They started off as a service for micro manufacturers. But by now, over30% of Katana’s product subscriptions come from the SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) segment. And nearly 50% of customers are located in the USA.
Our readers, who love Japanese culture, probably have a question. Is there any connection between Katana the company and katana the samurai sword?
Indeed, while the founders assembled a pitch to build a Manufacturing SaaS, they met the following term: Toyota Production System. For them, the samurais and ninjas were pretty logical topics to explore. Katana, the cutting-edge manufacturing software won by a landslide. 🥷🥷🥷
Expanding the team and scaling Katana
We can safely say that the boom of e-commerce is not slowing down any time soon. But before Katana can grow their family of manufacturers, they need to grow their own team first.
The katanauts (that’s what they call themselves) are a very international group of people with over 10 different nationalities (the more, the merrier).
The company offers its employees top-notch remote working infrastructure and a culture that has the best bits of a scaling startup. Innovative, yet stable. Not pivoting it’s roadmap every two months.
Katana, modern manufacturing & inventory software provider, has just recently raised $11M in funding. This together with the e-commerce boom will significantly fuel the Estonian SaaS startup business growth in 2021.
This left us wondering how the everyday work and life at Katana looks like these days?
We talked withPriit Kaasik, the co-founder and CTO at Katana, and asked him tonnes of questions. The conversation went deep into their technological backbone (full stack or function based delivery? in-house development or external services?). Also, the open discussion revealed a product mistake and how heavily underused their office PS5 is.
Take a look at the interview below 👇 and get a glimpse of Katana’s mindset. Or as Priit puts it “Why become a unicorn when you could be a unicorn 140 times over?”
You have jokingly said that “Being a blank canvas and a bit naive” is actually useful when leading the engineering team. How would you describe yourself as a CTO?
There is no good way to hide that I am a process guy first and technology guy second. I aim to be the facilitator of technological advancement to best serve and innovate Katana’s manufacturing platform as a service.
Being a hybrid describes me well – excelling at combining various aspects, never in a singular discipline like coding. My strength lies in defining and driving towards the technological impact that needs to be achieved (I hope others would confirm this).
That said, my favourite pass-time is assembly and tinkering with small-factor but powerful gaming PC-s. I assemble about 2 per month for friends (for their kids) and for people who know this hobby of mine. Some may consider me a gamer, but I‘m really hanging in there because of the technology…
How would you characterize the fundamental values of Katana’s development team?
We emphasize the importance of putting on theend user’s hat and understand the business better – using full stack development and User Stories. Other main pillars would include:
💡 product delivery in increments and iteration,
💡 never reinventing a wheel,
💡 the meaning of “minimal viable”,
💡 writing cloud-native software that is robust and scales with the business.
Mainly, the development team is on a quest for a smart solution.
Let’s talk about Katana’s technological backbone. What stack do you use?
We are currently focusing on adopting Kafka more widely (lessening the importance of internal API to serve dependencies) to scale the service better horizontally.
Micro frontends are something we concentrate on – to improve parallel delivery and deployment from different product teams. And as a product, Katana has set our eyes to solutions that help us to become a manufacturing platform with a popular app store.
Click on the picture to find more info about Katana’s tech stack
Katana uses Heroku, which limits people who enjoy deployment pipeline building. What kind of developers would be a perfect match with Katana?
The limitation is similar to any other choice of technology. It’s just a combination of Bitbucket Pipelines and Heroku Pipelines – a Katana flavor of it. It would greatly benefit if you:
✅ Like pattern-based engineering, building Lego blocks for yourself, your team and teams.
✅ Appreciate full stack development and the need to understand a customer.
✅ Enjoy working in an Agile team.
✅ Being a self-sufficient engineer, without the need to be actively managed and supported, is a treat we value a lot. Because we really prefer to manage people as little as possible.
A person, who enjoys tinkering and overpolishing solutions, will have a hard time at Katana. We look for engineers who understand that their value lies in their ability to dish out the “right stuff at the right time”. Not in the code worthy of a monument now and 10 years later (we value good code but not overdoing it).
What aspects are not developed in-house, but bought as an external service?
Let’s say that the scope of what Katana is doing, is roughly described here. And in order to deliver it, we use following services in Katana:
It is also important to note that Katana doesn’t have any technical operations nor DevOps people on-board. We consume data (Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Bull etc.) also as a service.
The cat or dog person question. Full stack, or front end & back end separately?
Full stack. Regarding customer features and end-to-end transactions, it’s far superior compared to function based delivery.
I have observed and participated in such designs in various top notch software development companies. In the case of web-based SaaS, I would always choose full stack to win it at the market.
It’s a focus thingie – eventually a product team has to be full stack and cross-functional, you have to work with the engineers you are able to hire.
In which case would you consider hiring front end and back end specialists instead of full stack?
To compensate for a weakness, bolster skills that are lacking or not represented enough in the company, but are important.
Looking back, what were the technical mistakes that you wish that could have been avoided when building the product? How did you fix it?
Just one thing pops to mind right away. We decided to upgrade our backend node.js framework LoopBack3 onto version 4. It has turned out to be a very expensive work with very little benefits (other than LB3 is no longer supported).
Should have assembled our own modification from a more lightweight backend framework a la NEST.
What direction are you scaling (horizontal/vertical etc)?
In all directions, of course!
But seriously, in the engineering team we emphasize the importance of horizontal scaling and the code supporting it.
Vertical scaling is for the emergencies, when the performance need is miscalculated and a performance issue quickly needs addressing. That is another reason why we chose Heroku, it really excels at this type of performance management and scaling.
Let’s imagine, I’m a newly hired engineer. How will my first days at Katana look like?
Once we agree and assemble the work gear and software set with the engineer – wintel, mac and/or Linux – you will be ready to go. You choose between onboarding in the office or remotely (your gear will be delivered at home). We use Slack and Whereby to communicate and run meetings etc. Also, this setup works really well with onboarding.
We also have a compensation system to expense the cost of home office setup and including headphones with active noise cancelling (must-have product these days).
When you’re comms-capable, the first weeks are for meeting fellow katanauts – learning the heartbeat and key information sources. In software engineering our current gold standard benchmark for the first day is to get the development environment up and running by noon, join our food club, have team lunch, fix a bug and get the fix to live by the end of the first day.
Fully remote or office?
Nobody is working fully in the office nowadays. That said, we are eagerly waiting for situation improvements, so we could restore the office experience to its former glory.
Even during the pandemic (when approached with precaution), our office has its perks (heavily underused PS5, barista-grade coffee etc). And our lunch club is still functioning! About 15% of people use the office at the moment, wear masks, and have spread out. Our office is new, roomy and really well ventilated.
Actually our new office will be ready by summer. It will be located in the newly renovated building next door to Põhjala Taproom at Noblessner. Even with new ways of working, we decided that having a joint workplace and meetings in person will remain an important part of our culture.
Double up the size of the engineering team each year!
The aim is to build a team to become a world’s leading manufacturing platform able to challenge SAP and such. You cannot really catch them otherwise – why become a unicorn when you could be a unicorn 140 times over?
But (there is always a but), business also has to grow accordingly, and so far we have mostly been hampered by lack of features to fully tackle SMB/SME manufacturing space.
Sounds like your cup of tea? Check out Katana’s current openings and apply!
