Berlin Spotlight: Engineering Leaders Raising the Bar
We’re excited to introduce you to three of our engineering leaders who are building our Berlin tech hub from the ground up.
In this article, we interview Adelina, Meng and Lucy, all a part of our Engineering Leadership team based in our Berlin office and supporting our wider London teams. Their backgrounds and experience cease to amaze us, from building engineering functions from scratch to even self-taught coding, these three are a dream team to work with. Learn what drives them and what makes them tick through this quick Q&A below. Enjoy!
Adelina is a Senior Director of Engineering at Beamery, based in Berlin and leading the Engage Vector. The Engage Vector is made up of teams Iceberg, Rocket, Chicory and soon to be forth (Caesar) who own the core user experience of Beamery’s CRM Talent Management Software and Beamery’s Chrome Extension. Adelina believes in autonomous teams, is a champion of experimentation, learning and a safe collaborative culture. She enjoys growing and empowering people and builds software that solves problems for users.
Meng is an engineering manager at Beamery. She enjoys building meaningful software and helping people to discover their potential. She is curious about different perspectives in software engineering and people. She has worked as a developer, QA, product manager, and technical support for B2B, B2C mobile and web applications. Meng has scaled several new teams for new product launches in enterprises, and startups in Asia and Europe. She believes in vision, empathy, empowerment and follow democratic leadership philosophy.
Lucy is Engineering Manager based in Berlin for the Vanguard team, which is a fully remote team. Vanguard provides private and public APIs for customers and internal partners, to access, extend, and customize Beamery’s data and workflow, and connect Beamery with the rest of the talent ecosystem. Lucy started in tech when she taught herself to code when she had an idea for a start-up but didn’t know anyone technical. She later refined her skills at Maker’s Academy in London before joining SoundCloud as an Engineer. Lucy switched tracks to Engineering Management due to the joy she found in the ‘glue work’ and helping support others’ growth.
Q&A Adelina, Meng & Lucy:
Why did you join Beamery?
💡 Adelina: The values are very important for me, they help us create the future we want and guides how we interact with each other and guide our decisions. The values that Beamery upholds resonate a lot with me, especially “Act with Kindness”, “Start with Why” and “Own the change you seek”. This was something that I could experience during my interview process and is something that I see in my day to day. Also, I like to solve problems, from building a new Engineering Hub in Berlin to solving scale-up organisation challenges.
🧠 Meng: The biggest reason was the mission of the company and the values are aligned with my personal beliefs. Equal access to jobs for everyone and Start with the Why resonates a lot with me. Being a software engineer or manager, I had the chance to live in different cities, I got to know so many wonderful people and this changed my life. I would like to make this happen to everyone no matter where you come from.
🚀 Lucy: As someone who has sat on both sides of the hiring table, I was excited by the opportunity to help make hiring more human and unleash talent. It didn’t hurt that everyone I met along the way was also super lovely.
What currently excites you about the work you’re doing?
💡 Adelina: We are just at the beginning of the journey of building the teams in Berlin, so the road ahead excites me. We already have great people on board and more will join us in the upcoming months, so I am looking forward to teams coming together and going through the necessary and inevitable process of storming, norming and performing. As I am just starting to work with our London-based teams from the Engage Vector, I am excited about meeting new people, learning a lot, and identifying areas where we can work together to tackle some of the challenges.
🧠 Meng: The potential of the product and the team. We have just started the first team in Berlin. We own Extension and are revamping it for better performance and adding new AI features which are going to be extremely helpful for sourcer. I am surrounded by people who care about each other and want to do something great together, this just feels great.
As a Leader at Beamery leading our Engineering Teams, how do you motivate the people around you?
💡 Adelina: It’s all about building momentum. People feel motivated when there is a safe place where they feel they are learning and growing, they understand the value of their work (why we are doing what we are doing) and they feel empowered to come up with solutions and make decisions. This is what I am focusing on.
🧠 Meng: I believe people want to have a purpose, want to be good at work and celebrate the great outcome together. I focus on setting clear goals, building autonomous teams, supporting them to learn the skills they need and they wish, coaching and giving feedback, and celebrating success and failures together.
As we are building a new Tech Hub in Berlin, we invite all the new joiners to own this together, to support each other towards our goals. We are going to define who we are together.
🚀 Lucy: Everyone is unique, for me, it’s really about getting to know people, what interests them, what they are looking for and opening up opportunities to them based on their desires.
What makes our Berlin tech hub unique? What’s the opportunity for new joiners?
💡 Adelina: We are building new teams that are embarking on exciting new projects to solve problems for our customers. Folks will be part of the early stages of the team formation and have an impact on shaping culture, building software and ways of working.
How do we really lead with DEI? And where do you see this happening in the process?
💡 Adelina: We have work to do in this area. We need to look at the data and make intentional immediate changes powered by internal and external feedback: from how we hire to how we support and how we promote people at Beamery. My goal is to build diverse teams (skill sets, genre, ethnicity, culture, backgrounds, etc.) and we are putting some effort at the moment to increase our genre diversity for our new teams.
🧠 Meng: The first step is to recognize we have some problems in this area. Listen to the feedback internally and externally. Keep reviewing and tuning the process like how we do hiring, promotion, way of working, flexibility policy, internal mobility, and measuring we are in the right direction. I am very glad that in the first month I joined, I had the chance to work with other passionate colleagues on the initiative of how we could change the status quo of diversity and inclusion in the hiring process. This is another example of living the value of “Own the Change We seek”.
Which Beamery values resonate the most with you?
🚀 Lucy: “Start with why” — for me, this is fundamental to how I think and problem solve in any aspect of life
What else energises you outside of work?
💡 Adelina: Going on daily long walks, preferably somewhere where there are lots of trees; if not somewhere in nature, a park will do :) Being in nature though is the best way for me to recharge, it helps bring things in perspective and focus on what’s important.
🧠 Meng: I enjoy doing Yoga even though I can never do a good Downward Facing dog. But I enjoy this discovery process and I felt great after a round of Vinyasa flow. I like travelling. Whether it’s a bustling city scene or stunning nature wonders, new energy and inspiration always recharge me after the journey and continue to inspire me in daily life.
🚀 Lucy: Outside of work I keep myself busy with a large backlog of books to read and too much cold brew coffee.
Any advice you would give to someone looking to join Beamery?
💡 Adelina: We are looking for people that want to solve problems in a collaborative way, are interested in building culture and innovate together on how to build products that delight our customers.
🧠 Meng: If you are looking for a place where you can make a change, make a positive impact, and work with kind and talented people, we are here!
Interested in joining Beamery’s Engineering, Product & Design Teams?
We’re looking for Software Engineers Front & Back Mid/Senior/Director, SRE Platform Engineers, Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, Product Operations/Managers/Designers across all levels and even more roles across London, Remote & Berlin! to join us — apply here!
