Jan Rosa: Back to his roots after a decade in Ireland
This month, caught up with Product Analyst, Ján Rosa. One of the newest members of the Innovatrics team, Ján joined the company in August 2017 after 12 years living in Ireland, most of which was spent working for Google at their EU Headquarters in Dublin.
Ján begins by telling us about his first impressions of Innovatrics:
“People are very open and willing to help – there’s a real family atmosphere here. It’s an exciting time to work at Innovatrics as the company is growing so fast and I’m part of a newly created product management team, with a lot of freedom in my new role. I can see already that Innovatrics has a culture of delivering the best technology possible and solving real problems on a global scale.”
Following his graduation from university in 2005, Ján and his girlfriend decided to move to Ireland:
“I’m from Banská Bystrica and I studied Automation at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. After graduating, my girlfriend and I decided that we’d like to try living in Ireland for a year or two. Little did he know at the time that we’d end up staying there for 12 years!”
Initially, Ján worked in a call centre, providing technical support for residential internet customers: “While the work wasn’t the most exciting, I have to credit it with rapidly improving my spoken English due to the variation of accents I encountered on a daily basis – for a small country, Ireland really does have a huge number of distinct accents!”
After a couple of months, an opportunity presented itself and Ján moved into IT recruiting with a small Irish company, who were soon to be taken over by a large corporate: “I decided to make the move into IT recruiting as my role in the call centre was temporary and this offered by better job security, as well as the opportunity to learn some new skills.”
Ján enjoyed almost four years with this company before a friend told him about an IT recruiter role at Google and he decided to apply:
“Everybody wants to work for Google. Apart from the obvious benefits such as free food, flexible working hours, and an onsite gym and swimming pool, I was really interested in working with people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. As well as this, the atmosphere at Google is really friendly and there is excellent collaboration between people. After three-and-a-half years, I became a Product Analyst for internal HR tools, a role I remained in until deciding to move back to Slovakia with my young family in mid-2017”
So what attracted Ján to Innovatrics?
“Ideally, I wanted to work for a small to medium company which is growing and has global products. I saw a vacancy for an IT consultant at Innovatrics and applied for the role, but specified that I didn’t want to travel internationally. I was surprised at how flexible Innovatrics were in accommodating me, so I went for an interview and they made me an offer. I did have offers from other companies but what swung it for Innovatrics was the opportunity to work in a rapidly growing company with flexible working times, home office, and a really great work-life balance, which, as someone with a young family, is really important to me.”
Another important factor in Ján’s decision to join Innovatrics was the opportunity to work with products which incorporate machine learning:
“Initially, I wasn’t really aware of how much time and effort Innovatrics invest on R&D for machine learning. Obviously, machine learning and artificial intelligence are major buzzwords at the moment, but I’ve had a keen interest in the topic since my early days at Google. As a relatively small company, the fact that Innovatrics has a dedicated R&D centre in Brno, who work on using machine learning to make their products better, was a major factor in me joining the company.”
