Interview — Women in Tech
Here’s an article written following an interview with Sarra, iOS SDK Engineer at Voodoo
She discusses why she chose to work at Voodoo and her vision about women in tech
Before you came to Voodoo, what was your background?
I studied at Esprit Engineering School in Tunisia before moving to Paris for my end of year internship at Herow. I was passionate about smart cities, the internet of things, and the algorithm of localisation. I’ve always been interested in developing and sharing third-party frameworks in mobile development, so I decided to stay in France and continue working on developing a third-party geofencing sdk and to gain experience in tech companies here.
Next I decided to join Sfeir as they work with a flexible organization. This allowed me to join tech circles and develop new skills, meet other passionate developers, and both participate and attend a lot of interesting conferences.
Why Voodoo?
Around 3 years ago, I was contacted by a Chief Tech Officer at Voodoo on Linkedin. They asked me for technical advice and suggested that we share best practices from our respective companies. The name and the gaming industry caught my interest, and I wanted to find out more. So, we organised a call and I got a really good vibe from them.
I really appreciated being contacted to share best practices. It felt like a very honest and ego-free approach, and we instantly clicked! The people I met all seemed to have a very down-to-earth approach and interesting backgrounds. I remember being pleasantly surprised when meeting the team just from the energy that they gave off. The atmosphere felt great, each member of the team had excellent technical experience and they all seemed very motivated. I could tell that the working environment was friendly and supportive, but challenging at the same time. I remember thinking: ‘Wow, I would really like to be a part of this team!’ A few weeks later they offered me a role on a specific project, the Voodoo SDK solution, which I accepted.
What makes you get up in the morning?
Everything really! The thing that I like the most is our catch-ups every morning on Hangout. We discuss projects that we’d worked on the previous day, bringing new ideas and suggestions that we’ve come up with in the meantime.
What was your integration like?
Even when I was working on a specific project at the beginning, the team always treated me as though I was a full-time employee, which I really appreciated.
My official integration started with a month of training with my new colleagues, and regular 1–1s with the last CTO of the Voodoo Ads team. The first thing I had to do was take ownership of a proof of concept until its release on one of our published games. During the first month, I had a list of steps to tick off every week with the team, who would also pitch in and challenge me on my point of view or my way of doing things, which was a great learning curve.
From your very first day in the company, you get to actively pitch in and participate, focusing on the tech aspect and studying the business impact of the project. You don’t just sit back and discover!
What three words would you use to describe your role?
Motivation: we tackle a lot of challenges on a regular basis. If we’re lacking challenges in our day-to-day life, we find new ones!
Team-oriented: we share a lot in our team and are constantly sharing best practices to seek improvement.
Determination: At Voodoo, we’re not afraid of facing difficulty. We persevere whatever the task at hand to deliver excellence in our work.
What is a typical workday like at Voodoo?
For a few months now, I’ve been in a new role that we came up with ourselves. We call it the ‘explorer’. I work with the Marketing Engineering team, but I intervene as an ‘explorer’ in the Gaming Engineering team for two trimesters. This means that I actively participate in projects and events within the Gaming Engineering team, whilst maintaining my original role in the Marketing Engineering team and reporting to their Data Science Manager.
We start the day with a daily meeting to catch up and discuss tasks for the day. We work in agile 2-week sprints, hosting a sprint planning, a retrospective, and a grooming meeting. We also add in regular catch-ups throughout the sprint to keep consistent communication and coordination between the team.
What’s the most exciting thing about your job?
I would say the most exciting thing about my job is the projects we do, and the Ownership we are given. You don’t always find this level of ownership in other companies.
We can suggest new ideas and projects. If we show the potential business impact of our idea with a proof of concept or data to support the claim, we can easily go deeper and push the project to be even bigger. Our project propositions are all shared on Notion (a project management tool), so you can sign up to get involved in any that you find interesting or think could bring added value.
What are the biggest challenges you face in this role?
I think the most challenging thing about my new role as an ‘explorer’ is getting out of my comfort zone. There are just so many interesting projects to get involved with, but you haven’t always mastered the technologies needed to succeed. So when you don’t know the technology at hand, you have to get out of your comfort zone, look for information and tutorials to train yourself, and of course ask advice from your team. For example, sometimes we need to deliver a feature fast or handle a complex multiplatform solution, and the most efficient way to do this is to take ownership of the task at hand. When it comes to taking ownership of a game, as an SDK iOS developer, you need to learn more about Unity! I therefore recently trained myself on Unity to improve my skills and be able to work closely with game developers. Both challenging and very rewarding!
What is the impact of your role at Voodoo?
I usually work on projects released on our hit games, so it’s pretty easy for us to see the impact of our features using the right data and dashboards!
My team are currently working on identifying and solving core business gaming problems like how to prevent In-App Purchase hacks. The impact of this project specifically can be translated into measurable results by monitoring irregular activities related to purchase transactions, for example.
What do you consider to be the essential qualities that a candidate for this role must possess (technical and soft skills)? Do you have any advice for them?
I work on many different projects within the company, but the essential part of my role is SDK engineering. I chose to discover different programming languages in order to get out of my comfort zone and develop new skills. There are always new and innovative tech projects at Voodoo, so you just have to go for it, or create one yourself! I think that once you’re confident with your skills and if you’re a curious person by nature, then you can learn the rest on the job.
My advice to potential candidates would be: there is no reason to hold back or prevent you from applying or taking the technical test. If you feel comfortable with the tech aspect, and love what you do, you have all you need to succeed in this kind of role and in your life.
What value speaks most about your time at Voodoo?
People often say that Ownership and Deliver are the Voodoo values that speak the most about me! However, I think that Helpfulness is the one that speaks most about my time at Voodoo, mainly because of the working environment, and the great people that I work with.
If you could change positions with someone at Voodoo, which one would it be and why?
I would love to work with our Training & Communication Specialist Huw Ryan!
There is a kind of emotional intelligence in his work and department. It’s important to relay key information to other colleagues and motivate them by giving them the necessary resources to train themselves.
For example, our English classes were one of my favorite kinds of “switch-off time” shared with other teammates.
Taking the time to discuss with colleagues and share different topics and different points of view is like getting to know each other and training at the same time.
So I would love to see how he manages to keep this session very interesting.
How do you feel about being a woman in the tech industry?
I know that women are still a minority in the tech industry, but we shouldn’t focus on percentages, but instead encourage future candidates to have confidence in themselves and go for it! I think we also need to demystify the tech industry as being a particularly ‘masculine’ or difficult environment.
How do you feel about being a woman at Voodoo?
I’ve never been treated any differently for being a woman at Voodoo. I settled into the team straight away, and have never had to think about the difference.
What would you say to female candidates that are thinking of applying for a job at Voodoo?
Join us, it’s awesome! There are always great opportunities to develop within the company, available to all. Uniqueness is one of our main values and for good reason — your skills matter. Being surrounded by such a great team, whatever their gender identity, can only be inspiring. You just have to be yourself!
Come and join us! https://www.voodoo.io/careers
