My name is Vlad and I want to tell a story about how I ended up in the Grakn Labs. Before joining, I already worked for a couple of years in Kyiv and right after the graduation from Polytechnic Institute I moved to London to my current position, but it was a long path.

I was never sure if this whole experience is useful in any way for the real world, as a software engineer, up until joining Grakn Labs. ... a lot of attention during the recruitment process is paid to problem solving skills. We have algorithmic problems as part of our interview process and now we want to find our next engineer here on Сodeforces ...

— When did you start competitive coding?

When I was in the ~7-8 grade, my teacher showed us a website with problems and we got very competitive about it. After that, I was participating in math and informatics competitions up until the end of university

— What did you learn/ how did participating in coding competitions impact your skills?

The main impact is boosting logic and STEM-related skills in general. For example, I was not preparing for math or physics competitions explicitly, I didn't 'train' for them in any way, but just from participating in coding competitions, as a bonus, I was taking places in math and physics.

— What's it like working at Grakn Labs as an engineer?

There is a huge difference compared to the rest of the places I worked. I've been a part of 3 different companies in Kyiv and none of them comes close to the level of the community's involvement and interest in Grakn. The majority of engineers I know have a 'job' job and the only goal is to get paid and go home, here we have different attitudes and priorities. We are a team driven by a purpose: to solve the world's most complex problems through, knowledge engineering.

- What type of problems are your working on?

Enterprise programming is significantly different from competitions, it is much more 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast' oriented, but I do have interesting challenges. The project I work on is a tool to test the performance of Grakn (a database). We have to generate data, insert it into the database, make a lot of different queries, measure their speed, correctness and visualize the results in a bunch of charts. It involves a lot of optimizations both on the server and client-side.

We're always looking for the best to round out our team, if you think this sounds like an interesting chance to work on an innovative technology; we'd love to hear from you.