Our Meet the Hiring Manager series allows you to get to know the people who grow teams at VMware Bulgaria. You will learn about our hiring managers’ career paths and what they look for in candidates during the interview experience.
This week meet Denitsa Gencheva, R&D Manager
Tell us about your career journey to date?
My journey started back in high school. I was excited about coding and took part in programming contests. Then I studied Computer Science in the University of Sofia and started my first job as a Java software developer. I was lucky to be part of a young and passionate team and focus on code quality and object-oriented design, efficient planning and team work. I gathered about 5 years of experience in several companies in the IT industry and then joined VMware in 2014.
As a software engineer at VMware I first worked on a product which collects and sends telemetry data from customer deployments of vSphere to VMware, alerts the customers to potential problems and recommends possible solutions. It evolved to VMware Analytics Cloud: the system behind VMware’s Customer Experience Improvement Program. It enables every employee (an engineer, product manager or exec) to know how our products are actually used and make data-driven decisions. From technical perspective, the challenges we face are related to big data, scale and distributed systems.
Two years ago I switched from engineering to a management role. My team of amazing engineers is responsible to drive forward key aspects of our data & analytics platform, now called Super Collider.
How is VMware different to any other tech company you have worked for?
My favorite thing about VMware is the culture that promotes learning and continuous personal and professional development. Programs like Take 1, Take 2 and Take 3 provide access to world-class trainings and new experiences within the company, but also during our everyday work we are encouraged to experiment, improve and develop new skills.
What makes this possible are the people around: your manager will often be your best coach and your coworkers – an incredible source of inspiration and know-how.
What has been the biggest lesson you have learned as you moved upwards in your career?
I learned the value of partnerships: with customers and users and also with other teams. Partnerships don’t replace the need for a strong team and solid technical solution, but amplify their impact.
For example, on several occasions working closely with ‘power users’ of our system, we were able to define and deliver a much better solution then we would have if we worked alone.
Your team is hiring. Can you tell us more about your organization’s charter?
We are building Super Collider: VMware’s largest data & analytics platform for Business Intelligence, customer-facing streaming analytics and Data Science. It’s already used by 70+ internal teams across the company, each of them managing their own datasets and building reports and analytics to address their business needs. We’re proud to see that our CEO Pat Gelsinger is a regular visitor of dashboards on Super Collider, together with 2000+ VMware employees.The platform is architected for petabyte scale, and our goal is to make it entirely self-service and to promote data democratization, re-use and collaboration.
My team is responsible for:
– Super Collider Control Plane / Self-service portal
– Data Pipelines: for scheduled pull data ingestion or building data marts
As an engineering team, we have full E2E ownership: from analyzing user needs and defining platform features and improvements, through building control plane / data management services in Java and Python, deploying them in Kubernetes and running them on production.
We are now hiring and looking for engineers with impressive analytical and problem solving skills to help drive the platform forward.
If someone reading this was coming to interview with you tomorrow for a role in your org, what interview tips would you give them?
It’s a very standard piece of advice, but clichés are clichés for a reason: be calm and be yourself, we’re looking forward to learn more about you and your strengths. During the interview, try to imagine yourself as part of our team.
Check out our open positions:
Senior Software Engineer, Data & Analytics Platform
