Interview — on BlaBlaCar’s tech hub in Kyiv and plans for a global bus marketplace

Introduction

In the spring of 2021, BlaBlaCar announced the creation of a new engineering hub in Kyiv, Ukraine. It would unite top engineers to develop and scale BlaBlaCar’s bus marketplace, a product used by millions of BlaBlaCar users across the world. In order to strengthen the direction of development and technological innovations in the region, the company hired VP Engineering CEE, Igor Ivashchenko.

Under Igor’s guidance, engineers will work on improving the platform, creating and connecting new features that meet the needs of both bus carriers and passengers, and help find bus tickets more easily and reliably. The appointment comes at a key moment for BlaBlaCar, as the company has big goals of digitizing the Ukrainian bus transportation market and scaling the technology to Latin America.

Q: Tell us about your experience before BlaBlaCar.

A: My experience in IT in large Ukrainian and international companies counts more than 20 years. Before joining BlaBlaCar, from 2016 to 2021 I worked as a director of Engineering for the US company called Netpulse (SaaS solution for fitness clubs). A little later Netpulse was acquired by EGYM, and I played a key role in the integration. Prior to that, I held the position of Divisional Director at Luxoft (2015–2016), earlier managed a 70-person team at Ciklum (Yapital ODC) (2015), enjoyed multiple consulting engagements in the Ciklum Consulting team (2012–2014), worked in several other international R&D companies.

In 2016 I was honored to receive a dual Executive MBA diploma from both IIB (International Institute of Business) in Kyiv and Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management — IAE specializing in Leading Business People and Innovation (Change Management).

Q: Why did you join BlaBlaCar?

A: I was very happy to join BlaBlaCar because its values are close to me. The social component of the product is very important to me. BlaBlaCar has an amazing entrepreneurial culture, a great startup spirit with an ocean of freedom of action, but also with great responsibility. This is a motivated team that works on one big mission, using very clear and realistic cultural principles.

Q: What teams/projects will you be leading?

A: My area of responsibility includes the entire engineering segment of Pro Marketplace — in simple words, an engine for booking and selling aggregated bus tickets through the BlaBlaCar app.

The ambitions are quite impressive — we are working on the global bus marketplace and focusing on the following areas at the moment:

• The first is to connect hundreds of new bus carriers. Busfor, a company that was acquired by BlaBlaCar a few years ago, has already attracted hundreds of carriers in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Belarus over 10 years, and we are focusing on the Brazil market, with the plan to connect more than a hundred new carriers in the nearest future.
• Also, we’d like to scale the platform to the entire world, that is, to make it global. BlaBlaCar has 100,000,000 users in Western and Eastern Europe, Turkey, India, and Latin America. If these territories are connected to bus services, the business of selling bus tickets can grow significantly.
• Thirdly, we will continue working on the reliability and usability of the platform.
• And the fourth task is to add more functionality in each new country, with each new carrier, which will make buying tickets even more convenient and assume local particularities and legal requirements of every region.

Therefore, to solve these four tasks, we need a powerful engineering team.

Q: What are your hiring plans?

A: Up to about 50 employees for the start, but it’s likely that by the end of the year we’ll increase the numbers up to 80–100.

We are looking for ambitious people who are able to work effectively in an international team. Team players who are professionally proficient in English. Engineers, who culturally fit our team, are eager to support the values of the company, who are able to drive our ambitions and bring us faster to our next step.

We currently have open positions for Java developers, QA engineers, and technical support. growing dynamically, and the need for qualified people with various skills arises over time, so it is likely that we will increase the number and types of open positions in the next quarter.

Q: What’s the future for BlaBlaCar in Ukraine?

The company has grown from a global carpooling community to become a global multimodal marketplace, uniting carpooling and buses for 100,000,000 users in Europe and Latin America on one platform. While the transportation industry is still recovering from the effects of the crisis, BlaBlaCar is gradually gaining momentum in growing markets, including Ukraine, which is one of the key markets for the company.

The Ukrainian bus market has big potential. Unlike European countries, the Ukrainian market consists of hundreds of bus operators. Many of them have their own business management system, which does not always meet their needs, because developing and maintaining such solutions is quite costly. The carrier wants to be engaged in transportation, but not in IT development, which is expected. We want to help carriers transform their business, take them to the next level and accelerate their growth.