Interview. Cris Radu: Adobe Romania to hire over 50 engineers for Bucharest site

With a turnover of USD 28 million, last year brought growth for Adobe Romania, which hired around 80 employees for tech positions. In 2017, the company plans to hire more than 50 cloud and big data engineers, reaching almost 500 people at its Bucharest site, its largest R&D center in the EMEA region.

One of the two flagship products developed at Adobe’s Bucharest site is One’s Primetime Authentication, developed exclusively in Romania for the media and entertainment market, which won an Emmy for technology and has a market share of 98 percent in the United States. The second, Adobe Experience Manager, the market leader in data management, is an exponent of Adobe’s new cloud and big data DNA, with more than 15 billion transactions processed daily and more than 1 petabyte of data to handle, entirely in the public cloud.

According to Cris Radu, Director of Engineering and Site Leader, Adobe Romania, engineering and operations positions are available in cloud and big data, two areas of knowledge the company is most interested in, as the local campus has developed massively on the SaaS (software as a service) side of Adobe – Marketing Cloud and Creative Cloud. “Half of the openings are for senior specialists, who should have strong expertise and experience in computer science, as well as important soft skills, such as an open mind, curiosity, product and customer focus. Also, considering the strategic partnership with Microsoft for its cloud services, we are looking for engineers with experience in Microsoft Azure,” Radu told BR.

Developing products for a global audience

“As an R&D campus, we don’t do basic customer service, but software development for top products that win awards,” said the Adobe head. “Therefore, we are looking for talents committed to working on key products on Adobe’s homepage. With them comes joy, but also responsibility. For example, we are looking for site reliability engineers for Adobe’s Data Platform on top of Microsoft Azure, as well as big data engineers for our Analytics Cloud.”

Finding staff, a major challenge for IT players

“Adobe Romania was voted the best company to work for three years in a row in an independent study conducted by AON Romania. However, finding the right employees remains our biggest challenge, as there is still a deficit of IT talent in Romania, especially in R&D,” said Radu.

Firstly, there is an imbalance between supply and demand, he argued, although supply is almost constant. “We target the top 5 percent. Demand comes from all sides of business: multinational companies opening new offices in Romania, local players, start-ups and our direct competition: global companies that target the same top 5 percent, the best specialists, and recruit them to relocate abroad.”

According to Radu, senior positions are the hardest to fill. “We need the best technical experts, but with a certain view of their work. The products we work on are in constant development, so we need our engineers to drive development with new solutions and a creative approach to meet clients’ demands.”

Hard to hire for diversity

Diversity and gender balance are two key factors driving innovation in a highly competitive team, and represent a very important part of the company’s talent strategy, Radu said. However, he added, “It’s hard enough to hire and even harder to hire for diversity, a challenge within a challenge. We want to show that women in tech are not just very good specialists, on a par with their male colleagues, but with their mindset, manage to bring a different touch to high-performing teams.”

Last year the share of women in Adobe’s Bucharest office reached 27 percent, close to the 29 percent Adobe average in the US, where the market average is about 20 percent. “However, as we know that well-balanced teams tend to be more effective, creative and successful overall, it is our desire to constantly raise the percentage. As for how we encourage the gender balance, I’d say we do it more for the market, than within the company. We have partnerships with the Polytechnic University for programs to attract women to IT engineering. We also support Codette, an organization that helps women programmers through workshops, online mentoring, conferences and presentations, hosting meet-up events every two months.”