Engineering Spotlight: Mihaela Ciobotaru
Mihaela is one of our backend engineers working and she is working within the Financial Services team at Mollie. After working for a couple of years as a developer in Romania, she moved to Amsterdam to help us build the future of payments. We asked her how her journey has been thus far.
It's been almost 6 years since I joined the engineering road, work-wise. I studied Computer Science (as a bachelor), but 6 years ago I started with my first internship. I still remember the excitement of doing so many practical things compared to the Uni. I also remember how I was looking at the future back then and how I was thinking that I would know almost everything web development-wise by this time, but luckily, there’s so much more to learn. Of course, the environment matters a lot when it comes to our learning path and fortunately, I feel like I’m in the right one. I still encounter unknown things in my day-to-day work and I also learn a lot from my colleagues.
Team Financial Services
I’ve been working for Mollie for more than 2 years now, as a back-end engineer in the Financial Services team.
When I started, the team had the size of 6 developers. Our main focus was to build feature parity for this new bookkeeping project that would allow the system to scale easier and us to build new products on top of it considerably with less effort.
Over time, I witnessed the team doubling in size. While building feature parity was getting closer to the end, we needed to migrate customers to the new system without downtime, but also to start developing new value streams for the customers on top of this newly built system.
With these projects in mind, the growth of the team was inevitable, but once it happened, we faced a few challenges. We needed to bring up to speed quite a few joiners by sharing our business knowledge, to keep our flows efficient, and to keep the feeling of a team no matter the size.
As part of the team, I designed a few projects, for which I needed to communicate with the stakeholders to understand the requirements, translate the requirements into technical issues and implement them.
Outside of that, I worked on improving our current flows, both the performance and the code structure, I worked on improving monitoring on our processes and on minimizing failures on our side because of external services, I did code reviews by making sure they met our technical guidelines, but also the business requirements and not least, I helped with recruiting a few of my colleagues, gladly some of them being even part of my team.
Free time
In my free time I like doing plenty. From reading novels to traveling, dancing, playing piano lately, but to keep it on a technical track, I started lately having fun with some capture the flag challenges. I had a security training at some point within Mollie where we did that in teams, which reminded me how exciting it was during Uni. After all, we all like quick gratifications, don’t we? :D
Why Mollie?
I joined Mollie because I was excited to work for an international company that has a lot of focus on quality and stability, high complexity when it comes to its systems, all needed for the thousands of customers that use Mollie every day.
I keep working for Mollie because I feel valued and challenged most of the time and also because I really appreciate the colleagues I’m working with. I’m surrounded by lots of experienced people from which I can learn, like-minded, that form teams having friendship at its core.
Mihaela and her team are hiring, so in case you feel inspired by her story and would like to work with her take a look HERE.
Interested in more stories like Mihaela’s? You can find them HERE.
