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 Radoslav Gavrailov, R&D Manager.
What’s unique about the team you’re leading?
I joined the company at the beginning of the year and started leading a team located in Sofia which is working on the VMware Cloud data analytics platform known as Super Collider. I already knew that there were a lot of teams using it and uploading huge volumes of data but what I found exceeded my expectations – I ended up working on one of the most widely adopted products within VMware which help our customers to work seamlessly navigating through Petabytes of data. The decisions we take and the work we do is critical, which is what everyone in the team looks forward to – seeing the impact of their pieces of code plugged into the big project as soon as possible.
What is your team’s tech stack?
We are using Java, Apache Spark (ETL), Apache Kafka, K8s, Docker.
If you can use one to three words to describe your team, what would they be?
Ambitious, motivated, young.
Share some interesting details about your colleagues?
Our team is full of talented people who are the driving force behind many initiatives. We have a trainer in an IT academy, speakers and participants in study groups and university conferences.
Tell us about your career journey to date?
I started from the very beginning of the IT ladder by taking part in a Summer internship campaign in one of Bulgaria’s leading telecom operators in 2013. After spending three and a half years there and reaching the Senior software developer level, I decided to leave and join my next company – Software AG Bulgaria. I started there in 2017 and spent 5 years in a team developing and maintaining a product called Universal Messaging – the SAG’s messaging broker – based on Java, Multithreading, and memory management. Persisting in big data sets and keeping them consistent was not a challenge for us, but one of our main features. A few years later I decided to pursue a management career and started leading a multinational team of around 10 people being responsible for their personal development as well as them contributing to the product and the company as much as possible. At the beginning of the year, I decided to write the next chapter of my career and joined the growing Data analytics platform team in VMware as an R&D Manager. Now I am looking for other people looking for a new challenge in their development to come join our successful and still developing team.
How is VMware different from any other tech company you have worked for in the past?
The scale, the technologies and the opportunities VMware offers to its employees. It’s one of the biggest IT companies in Bulgaria and despite the fact that it has thousands of employees the attitude towards the employees is very personal in terms of personal growth and opportunities for development. The tech stack doesn’t need to be re-emphasized as I believe everybody is aware that VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services all over the globe.
What has been the biggest lesson you have learned as you moved upwards in your career?
In order to be successful, you need to be smart and intelligent but that’s not all. You need to grow and try to learn new things on a daily basis, be able to communicate your thoughts and ideas to your team members and outside the team, and be able to adapt to different situations that you find yourself in during your career.
If someone reading this was coming to interview with you tomorrow, what interview tips would you give them?
Be you – I would like to understand more about you as a person – what drives you forward, what makes you happy, and how do you deal with problems and tough situations in your life.
Don’t worry and ask questions – I would like to have a chat with you, but it’s not just me asking the questions – take your time, prepare for you being the interviewer – ask me about the team, the type of the job, the processes we follow, whatever you can think of that would help you do the right choice.
Check out the open position on Radoslav’s team.
