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Alizer Stories: It's in our DNA to try out new things

Published on
February 10, 2023
Author
Aliz Team
Aliz Team
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Alizer Stories: It's in our DNA to try out new things

Balázs Hegedűs has been at Aliz for three years. During these years his role has changed several times. He thrives on the constant challenges and development opportunities he has found at Aliz. Our company culture enables our colleagues to find new opportunities that fulfill their potential, find their place in the organization, and make the most of themselves. Learn more about Balázs's story at Aliz.

Aliz supports colleagues when they feel they would like a change in their role or even to shift their career completely. There are examples such as becoming a DevOps engineer from an application development engineer, moving from being a backend developer to a frontend developer, becoming a HR specialist after being a sales representative, changing to a data engineer after being a recruiter, etc. We believe that a person is not defined by their position but by their skills. And skills can be used in multiple ways. Let’s take a look at some of the milestones of Balázs’s career at Aliz to see how it worked out in his case.

Balázs met Aliz in the summer of 2020 during an informal discussion. A few months later he started working for Aliz as the Development Lead of a product idea. He instantly found himself in a new situation, since throughout his career he had mainly coded in C++ and C#, and at Aliz, we mainly use Java and Python. Aliz’s philosophy is that it doesn’t matter if someone has experience only in other backend programming languages as long as they are open to learning Java and Python. And Balázs was open indeed.

In August 2021, there were some changes around the product idea, so Balázs started a new role leading a recently launched R&D initiative. Almost from scratch, he built up a culture and framework for developing in-house solutions for making the team's life easier, making project deliveries cheaper, and providing technical background for opening to new market segments. As he says, "R&D is essential for the company to be able to develop and innovate continuously. As a first step, develop by standardizing or even optimizing internal processes to increase efficiency. This also provides the framework to react flexibly to market changes and to prepare for the use of new technologies. The system took about six months to set up. It’s been working very well for more than a year now and will be further developed next year.”

Balázs continues to support the R&D initiation, but besides that, he was looking for another challenge. He found it in leading the Application Development team within Aliz. Aliz delivers off-the-shelf, or custom-built applications, data analytics, ML, and infrastructure solutions on Google Cloud for its customers. If the solution is related to application development, his team will be the one who delivers it. Aliz always dealt with application development in various ways but Balázs was given the task of organizing these activities into a standalone department. "We kept efficiency and innovation in mind when we created the AppDev team during the summer of 2022, with all kinds of competencies covering the full life-cycle of an application development project: architecting, backend development, frontend development, testing, and project management. The base idea was that we would be bringing the tasks to a team instead of taking the people from a pool of developers to the tasks. Together, the members of this fixed team have greater competence and a broader professional perspective, which provides more mentoring opportunities, helps the work and increases customer satisfaction”, explains Balázs when asked how and why the team works.

When Balázs began leading the AppDev team, he noticed that there was a substantial need among junior and medior developers to gain more knowledge and to be trained in different topics around coding. He realized that he could help them to learn these by initiating a training series around clean coding as a first step, which quickly escalated into a company-wide initiative. “Here, we take topics that provide the team with immediately usable knowledge. We offer them the opportunity for development and career progression, while also helping any member of the team to deepen their knowledge in expertise that interests them most”, he explains.

“With Aliz, I get the very rare opportunity to be where I feel most comfortable within the company, so I can get the most out of it. I have a constant sense of achievement, and they are open to my ideas. If that means doing something different every year within the company, that's fine. I'm happy to be here and make Aliz even more successful, while continuously reaching new milestones in my own career.”

At Aliz, we believe in motivating our team by giving them the opportunity to develop their personal competencies, rather than expecting them to work in rigid systems and structures. In the long term, this approach leads to trying out new things and developing unique solutions with our colleagues. If you would like to join our team, send us your CV. 

If you would like to join our team, check out our open positions.

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Aliz Team
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