Adobe plans new hires, gender balance talent strategy in Romania

Adobe Romania, the US software company's largest Research & Development center in Europe, plans to add 70 more engineers to the existing product teams in Bucharest as well as set up new teams, Cris Radu, Director of Engineering and Site Leader at Adobe Romania, told Romania-Insider.com. The company hired more than 80 new employees for technical positions in 2016, getting close to the 500 people milestone in Bucharest. “We aim for a moderate increase every year because we focus a lot on quality vs. quantity. Instead of rushing to hire for numbers, we like to choose carefully and invest in proper integration of newcomers in the team,” Cris Radu says of the company’s future recruitment plans. Cloud and Big Data are the areas the company is interested in, and engineer positions with experience in Microsoft Azure are among the profiles available. This happens as Adobe developed on the SaaS (software as a service) side of Adobe – Marketing Cloud and Creative Cloud, and because of its strategic partnership with Microsoft for its cloud services. “Adobe is very much a cloud company nowadays and keeping the cloud running flawlessly takes a special kind of skill. This why we invest aggressively in growing our operations team, and so a lot of positions are dedicated to service reliability, automation, and scalability,” Radu explains. The senior positions remain the most difficult to fill, with Senior Software Developer and Site Reliability Engineer two of the harder to find profiles. “We are looking to hire within the top 5% best specialists. The senior positions are the most difficult to occupy: we need the best technical experts, but with a certain view on their work. […] The products we work on are in constant development, so we need our engineers to drive the development with new solutions and a creative approach to solve for customer needs,” Radu says. But the company hires fresh graduates as well, in addition to the experienced staff, recruited either from Romanian or multinational companies present locally. Some 30% of the company’s technical roles are held by women, a proportion the company says is “closer where the balance should be in the industry in the long term.” It is also looking to increase the percentage. “Compared to the IT companies in Romania, where we estimate an average of 10-12% women in tech roles, we feel like we are definitely leading here,” Radu explains. “Diversity and gender balance is a very important side to our talent strategy. We know for sure that these are two key factors driving innovation in a highly competitive team.” Radu mentions the local tax system as one aspect influencing the company’s recruitment plans. “The most needed aspect, one that Romania lacks from time to time, is predictability. Insufficiently prepared changes in the tax system can have a major impact in our recruitment plans, as we work based on yearly budgets for salary and benefits. Sudden changes, such as the ones affecting social security contributions and health plan contributions back in January, require us to adjust and adapt in a hurry for new market conditions, which is not always simple. On the plus side, here I want to mention the tax exemption for software developers; this is really making a difference in attracting and retaining key talent in the country,” he says. The company looks at its future growth as taking on bigger product development responsibilities every year. “This is the kind of growth we are after, not headcount per se. Of course, we want to continue growing our site, and so we keep on hiring the best people in the market. As we attract more specialists, we will be able to create locally or bring these new products from Adobe’s portfolio to be developed in Bucharest,” Radu explains. Adobe Romania develops several products, including Adobe Audience Manager, a market leader in data management, with more than 15B transactions processed daily and operating entirely in the public cloud. Another product is Primetime Authentication, a product developed exclusively in Romania for the media and entertainment market. It won an Emmy for technology and has a market share of 98% in the United States. The range also includes creative products like Adobe Experience Design or enterprise offerings for digital marketing like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager.