Business / technology
Ukrainian Intellias in Croatia
Over 2 billion people around the globe use tech products developed by Intellias engineers. They recently opened their Croatian office, and now they are hiring rapidly.
Intellias develops complex software solutions, provides professional services, and focuses on the automotive, transportation, mobility, financial, agriculture, and telecommunication industries.
Their latest solutions focus on Modern Data Infrastructure (MDI), rapid cloudification, product design, and Intelligent Automation with augmented decision-making, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), computer vision, and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technologies.
We were curious about how they were managing in these difficult times. Vitaly Sedler, CEO and Co-founder of Intellias helped with insights on this occasion.
Some of your locations today include Boca Raton, Chicago, Berlin, Dubai, Riyadh, Krakov, and Lviv. But, can you share with us briefly how Intellias’ story started?
During the last 20 years, Intellias transformed from a one-room office into one of the biggest IT companies in Ukraine, with over 2600 specialists on board.
Intellias was founded in 2002 by Mykhailo Puzrakov, Executive Chairman and I, alongside the first .NET framework release.
In 2015, the company started setting up new development centres all over Ukraine, including Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Ivano-Frankivsk. In 2018, we partnered up with an investment fund, Horizon Capital, and the following year we opened our first office outside of Ukraine, in Krakow, Poland. It is still the biggest foreign development centre of Intellias.
This year we opened our development centres in Zagreb, Croatia, and Sofia, Bulgaria. We also set up three new offices in Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Gdansk, Poland. Besides, the company has offices in Germany, the US, and the UAE.
We keep developing our business in Ukraine, and this spring, we opened a new Intellias office in Uzhhorod. We are also ready to open offices in Portugal, Spain, Colombia, and India.
In May this year, Intellias announced the opening of its Croatian office. How is the process going at the moment?
We recently opened an office in the ultra-modern Matrix Business Park that can welcome up to 25 specialists. Our recruitment department is talking to several candidates at the moment.
Our Croatian team will have roughly 40% local specialists, 40% relocated from Ukraine and 20% engineers from the rest of the world. Since Croatia’s culture is somewhat close to ours, many of the Intellias engineers are willing to relocate.
The team will work on large-scale projects with our top international clients from the DACH region and the US. We firmly believe that together with the Croatian team, we will be able to provide our clients with quality technology solutions and services.
What are your expectations of this new location?
When choosing the next country for the Intellias offices, we have to consider the level of IT community development, the number of engineers, the comfort of working and living conditions, and the enabling business environment. The Croatian market has met these requirements.
Creating an IT hub in Croatia is an essential step on Intellias’ way to entering new European markets. We expect a new office in Zagreb to become the centre of the future South-European IT hub. As a global company, we always welcome everyone who shares our values.
This year we plan to hire around 50-70 specialists. We also plan to expand the team to 300 engineers in the next few years. 10% of the team will be composed of Junior specialists, 35% Middle specialists, and 55% Senior specialists.
We are ready to welcome Croatian specialists and talents from all over the region who are eager to work with us. We have dozens of open positions for Croatian experts.
Open Vacancies
Senior Backend Golang Engineer
Senior Automotive Security Engineer
Senior Python developer with thorough DevOps knowledge
Head of Excellence
You have been ranked as the best IT employer in Ukraine by Forbes Ukraine in 2020 and 2021. How would you describe your company culture?
Intellias culture is all about partnership. We treat our clients and colleagues as partners. We are deeply committed to teamwork and synergetic in our actions. We act with empathy and reach our mutual goals by understanding the context and each other’s motivations. That’s how we succeed together.
Our main principle is people over process; we follow it in everything we do — in our day-to-day work and global strategic solutions.
For instance, we created a Career Hub where our colleagues could manage their careers. This online hub unites all professional opportunities in one place, starting from feedback and compensation review and finishing with training, mentorship, rotation, or relocation.
With its help, professional growth becomes more accessible, comfortable and transparent. With this platform, we fulfil our human-to-human attitude in daily processes. Intellias constantly invests in the education and development of its specialists.
One of the company’s values is a growth mindset. We use this principle as a foundation to develop competencies, learn, and grow professionally. Because business growth creates opportunities for people, and people’s development creates business opportunities.
For instance, now we’re trying to enable each specialist to find a mentor and level up their career. We are also working to provide our specialists with access to world-leading educational platforms. As a pilot project, 800 Intellias specialists are already using those platforms.
With over 20 years of experience working with technology, Intellias has been named one of the best employers and service providers multiple times and the most family-friendly company in Ukraine, according to UNFPA.
How is the current situation impacting business and people, and what helps you the most?
Our country is at war, and the situation is critical in Ukraine’s eastern and southern parts. In late February and March, northern parts of the country, Kyiv included, were also under attack. Bearing that in mind, we have evacuated around 1300 Intellias specialists with their families to the safer western parts of Ukraine.
We used our offices in Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk as volunteers’ headquarters and temporary shelters for the evacuated colleagues.
Thanks to our effective Business Continuity Plan, the commitment of our specialists, and smoothly running communication within the team, we had restored all of our service delivery capacity by March.
Also, our clients have demonstrated a deep understanding and support. They are constantly offering their help. Moreover, several new clients have recently joined the company. Business globalisation is a part of Intellias’ development strategy.
The war in Ukraine has significantly spurred our growth plans. What we have planned for two years in advance will now be implemented in 6-9 months. We are currently exploring the possibility of further global expansion, analysing different markets. We plan to hire around 800 engineers outside Ukraine by the end of this year.
We believe that Ukraine will soon win this war. After that, we will be able to full-scale develop our Ukrainian offices alongside the development centres abroad. However, even now, we are actively growing in Ukraine, offering 200 vacancies to Ukrainian developers.
