“We are looking for a Ukraine Engineering Site Lead to grow our engineering presence in Kyiv, Ukraine. In this role, you’ll be the first and founding member of the Ukrainian engineering team and help us rapidly build out a team in Kyiv, partnering with the Kyiv-based regional leadership team,” the job description reads.

This person will report directly to the company’s CTO, and one of his or her main tasks will be to hire developers who can work on Glovo platforms and products.

Key qualifications required:

• Experience operating large scale distributed systems and leading large engineering teams
• Experience in working with international teams
• Experience as an engineering leader in a fast-paced, product-focused, and agile development environment
• Experience working proactively
• Ability to understand the impact of changes within an engineering organization and how best to manage that impact
• Excellent spoken and written English

The company clarifies that even if candidates do not meet 100% of the requirements, they can still apply.

The reason for this decision is growth and expansion of the company. The company has already started to recruit employees to the Ukrainian team.

“Now our main task is to build a professional team in Kyiv and keep working, continuing SoftTeco’s successful history in Ukraine,” Alexey Shevchik, CEO of SoftTeco, commented on the opening.

More about SoftTeco

SoftTeco is a software development company founded in 2008 that provides custom software development services. The company’s activity is focused on:

• Development of web applications and systems on JAVA, .NET, NodeJS platforms
• front-end development using Angular, React, Vue
• development of mobile applications

In 2020, SoftTeco had 250 employees. The company has offices in Belarus (Minsk, Gomel), Poland (Warsaw), and Lithuania (Vilnius). Among the clients are Blueprint, Via, Covr, BelSwiss Bank.

According to Clutch analytical agency, the company is included in the list of the leading software development service providers, as well as in the ranking of the top mobile application development companies, according to TopDevelopers organization.

The office will be located on 7, Klovsky descent, in the Carnegie Business Center on the 45th floor with an area of ​​600 square meters. That’s how it will look like (images provided by Paymentwall):

Paymentwall is mainly hiring the following key positions: Frontend (Angular/React) and Backend (PHP) developers, UI/UX designers, graphic designers, and account managers (receivable, payable).

The team members will be distributed between Paymentwall itself and the company’s new products – Terminal3 and FasterPay – which we shall discuss below.

What does the company do?

Last year, Paymentwall launched two new products – Terminal3 and FasterPay.

Terminal3 is a platform for launching, promoting, and monetizing video games. Steam and Epic Games Store are its competitors. According to Petrov, Wargaming, KakaoGames, Goodgame Studios, Tencent and NetEase are the ones among the product’s customers.

FasterPay is an e-wallet and international payment system accepting payments via Visa, Mastercard and bank transfers providing quick and streamlined transactions, competing with PayPal and local e-wallets.

The Paymentwall platform itself will provide global payment coverage, integrating over 150 local payment methods globally such as WechatPay in China, Boleto in Brazil, Konbini in Japan, iDeal in the Netherlands, and many others.

Paymentwall offices

Paymentwall is a global payments platform with Ukrainian roots. The first Paymentwall office was opened in Kyiv in 2004, and still remains one of the main development centers of the company. Currently, over 40 employees work here.

In general, the company’s staff is distributed between 15 offices: San Francisco, Phoenix (Arizona, USA), London, Berlin, Lisbon, Sofia, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Seoul, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hanoi, Manila, Bangalore, and New Delhi.

In 2019, the company plans to grow and scale up to 300 employees.

Investments in office space

Yevgeny Petrov said that the need to open the office has been caused by the launch of new products and, accordingly, due to the need for additional working space for new employees. He also stated that Paymentwall intends to invest UAH 60 million in its development in Ukraine in 2019.

Violin Memory provides integrated enterprise hardware and software solutions for data storage based on flash memory. The company employs over 260 employees globally and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Their core staff of developers is also there, while sales managers work in regions of South America, as well as Europe and Asia.

Now about 50 specialists in Ukraine will join the Californian company’s developers and engineers. In Ukraine, the company plans to develop software for its solutions.

According to Ebrahim Abbasi, СOO of Violin Memory, in addition to software development, the Ukrainian team will also handle QA. “We will begin with 50 developers in Ukraine and their number will increase as our products grow,” he explained to AIN.UA, adding that they do not plan to relocate Ukrainian employees to California.

This is how Abbasi explained the choice in favor of Ukrainians: “Firstly, Ukraine is in the top five most educated countries worldwide and developers here are in abundance. That’s why it is a suitable destination for tech companies. Before making a final decision in favor of Ukraine as the place for creating our remote R&D, we evaluated many places, including Romania and India. We paid attention to demographics, level of education, availability of resources, and most importantly, the willingness to go an extra mile. As a result, GlobalLogic in Kyiv became our best choice.”

Developers of Violin Memory in Ukraine will work as consultants of GlobalLogic and will be housed in the R&D center of GlobalLogic in Kyiv. Abassi calls this cooperation a “hybrid model”, without mentioning the working conditions of Ukrainians. “Cooperation with GlobalLogic will allow us to utilize a hybrid model where internal and external resources will allow us to scale on the market in a shorter time,” he says.

In contrast, SimilarWeb has upped the ante in Ukraine. Recently it became known that the global giant of web-analytics has been having its own team of developers in Kyiv for about a year now. Moreover, it is called the official office of SimilarWeb in Ukraine, although it has existed on the basis of Kyiv’s own Ciklum during all this time.

According to AIN.UA’s source in SimilarWeb, Tel Aviv, it all started as a partnership with Ciklum, but currently, all employees of its Kyiv office (15 people) are full-time salaried employees of SimilarWeb. “The office was founded in June 2015 with the goal of rapid strengthening and expansion of development resources. Kyiv team is involved in developing of all key elements of the product in sync with the teams located in Tel Aviv (for example, main website similarweb.com development team, mobile application analysis development team),” said Pavel Tuchinsky, Marketing Analyst of SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb is not the only partner of Ciklum who hires Ukrainian developers according to such a model. The opening of R&D centers on the basis of outsourcers is not a novelty for Ukraine, there are quite a few similar cases, but rarely companies are ready to announce it openly and most of the projects are strictly confidential. However, R&Ds in Ukraine are also opened by Western customers on the basis of smaller outsourcers.

On July 28, 2016, the first R&D center of the European media platform glomex (part of the German media holding ProSiebenSat.1.) was launched in Kyiv. The office was created on the basis of Ukrainian IT company Team Technologies with headquarters in Lviv. Ukrainian team of glomex has over 20 developers working in various directions: Machine Learning, Big Data, Android, iOS, Ruby, PHP, and JS. The company plans to expand its Ukrainian office.

“Ukrainians participate in the development of a new product, which was presented by  German ProSiebenSat.1, one of the key players of the European media industry, in April 2016. It is a glomex media exchange platform, which has gained wide popularity on the territory of German-speaking countries, particularly, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany,” Team Technologies shared with AIN.UA.

So far, cooperation with outsourcers is more convenient and profitable for Western companies than opening their own full-fledged R&Ds in Ukraine. Igor Beda, managing Director of GlobalLogic in Ukraine, explained the reasons why international companies prefer to enter Ukraine through outsourcing:

“Ukraine is interesting to international companies with a large number of talented engineers and good expertise in R&D for a broad spectrum of business areas. However, the unfavorable investment climate and changing business rules slow down the emergence of many international players in Ukraine. Partnership with us not only minimizes these risks but also gives customers access to the necessary engineering expertise, reduces the time of bringing new products to market, promotes the qualitative transformation of their business, for example, through the use of our experience in software development.”

Some companies go the other way – they acquire their IT partner along with their entire team. That’s what Ericsson did. It has been present in Ukraine for over 100 years, but it did not have its own R&D centers before the acquisition of the Ukrainian-Polish IT Company Ericpol. Now Ericsson has its own development center with 120 developers.

[Editor’s note: The original article was published on August 10, 2016, and information contained therein is valid.]