Our Meet the Hiring Manager series allows you to get to know the people who grow teams at VMware. You’ll learn about our hiring managers’ career paths and what they look for in candidates during the interview process. This week we’d like you to meet Kunka Kuncheva, R&D Manager, VMware Cloud Provider Program.
What’s unique about the team you’re leading?
Our team works on consumption license metering. That’s a short way of saying building the tools and capabilities to take products from other groups and bill them based on features used. The value is building the capability for Cloud Providers to offer unique and powerful services at very granular levels and making the cost of VMware align with how they sell these services.
The team becomes more than just engineers, but practitioners of business as code. Decisions in how licensing can be granular empower companies to be able to create something new. The Cloud Provider program basing its licensing on usage-based pricing and billing means that VMware succeeds when the partner succeeds. This is product-led growth, and our team has led that charge for VMware for almost a decade.
If you can use one to three words to describe your team, what would they be?
Drive, Purpose, Attitude.
Share some interesting details about your colleagues?
Besides the execution, we invest our time in bringing value back to our communities.
- As organizers and mentors at VMware Talent Boost Academy – VMware’s academy for talented university students who want a boost of knowledge and practical experience to start their career in Software Development
- As Power of Difference (POD) leaders and members of VMinclusion @Bulgaria – Power of Difference communities are employee-driven groups that help drive representation, amplify the voice of underrepresented groups and foster our inclusive culture.
- Participating in different Service Learning activities – at VMware, every employee receives 40 paid hours each year to contribute their talents and time to Service Learning
- As leaders and speakers of Women Who Code inspiring women to excel in technology careers
- As speakers and panelists of meetups and conferences – Java and CNCF meetups, HackConf, DevTalk
- As mentors of kids to program in CoderDojo
Tell us about your career journey to date?
My career journey dates from the summer of 2010. I completed 2nd year at Sofia University where I was studying Software Engineering. I was bored after a month of staying at home during the summer vacation. While browsing for articles in the Software Engineering category, I came across a job posting for a summer internship. I decided to give it a try and after a week of preparing my CV, I applied for the job. A week later, I started as a Java software developer for MFT product. I was lucky to be part of a team with a great attitude and deep industry and technical knowledge.
I joined VMware in 2016 as a software engineer, changing completely the technical and product stack. It was a fresh restart and one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. For the past 6 years, I was able to work on the whole solution we provide to our partners – starting with an on-prem product that collects usage data and has strict release lifecycles; going through the SaaS transformation and building one of the first services in our business group from scratch, changing the mentality from on-prem core development to SaaS mindset; to working with big data and deep understanding of the distributed system.
A year ago, I challenged myself again switching from engineering to a management role, making sure our team of amazing engineers meets business requirements and improve customer satisfaction with super-high quality solutions.
What has been the biggest lesson you have learned as you moved upwards in your career?
The sky is the limit with the right vision, the right culture, and the right organization.
If someone reading this was coming to interview with you tomorrow, what interview tips would you give them?
Be brave, stay calm, and be yourself!
Check out the open positions in our team:
Staff/ Lead Software Engineer, Cloud Subscription – Opportunity for Working Remotely
Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Subscription – Opportunity for Working Remotely
