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Join the Engineering & Product Departments at Celonis: Part 2
If you have already read part 1 of this blog [see here], you’re well on the way to understanding what we’re about here at Celonis and why it’s a great place for developers to find the professional and personal satisfaction we all want from our working environment. In this blog I’m going to share five more great reasons why you should join Celonis and give you tips on how to take this further.
Reason 6: No day is like any other
In terms of agility we of course have roadmaps for how we see Celonis’ software developing but our developers are given a lot of flexibility to choose how they want to reach the destination. Being agile helps us come up with totally new ways to complete our tasks accurately and quickly.
This applies to a large spread of daily activities. The tech stack ranges from database development with C++, via the backend and frontend stacks, to platform engineering. For an insight into what this way of working feels like, I spoke to Oliver Heilmann, Junior Software Engineer, who told me: “One of the first projects I worked on when starting at Celonis was a fuzzy duplicate checker which we called cluster-strings. Customers often face the problem that their data might contain typos or other minor issues. Given a list of strings, the goal of this project was to find all pairs of strings which only deviate by a little bit from each other. What sounds easy is getting fairly complex when you consider the huge amounts of data our customers want to analyze. The basic approach of checking every string against every other string does not work in these complex environments. To overcome this problem my colleague Willi gave me a paper he wrote during his PhD thesis about set similarity joins, which tries to solve a similar problem. Equipped with new knowledge and able to ask Willi basically every question about these kinds of algorithms reduced the complexity of this project massively and made the whole implementation a very insightful experience. Top performance is a must and cluster-strings now allow our customers to analyze datasets containing thousands of strings instantaneously.”
Reason 7: Share knowledge and do what really interests you
When human beings are focused on delivering a project, there’s a risk we lose sight of a couple of really important things - because we haven’t allowed the space for them. One is sharing knowledge and the other is pursuing ideas that look potentially valuable - but might be a bit off track.
At Celonis, knowledge sharing and continuous personal and skill development are what help make us be the best at what we do. That’s why we created the Excellence@Tech space - four hours every week for everyone in the team, put aside to share knowledge about something you feel your colleagues might want to know or should know. It could be something new and cool in coding. Or an approach you’ve seen somewhere else or read about getting great results that you believe could be applied at Celonis. Maybe it could be getting up to speed with new software updates or brainstorming new ways to do things. It’s down to you. In one recent example, the team responsible for the Celonis core libraries put on an ‘Ask us Anything’ session - providing really vital understanding for many others across the organization whose work requires deep knowledge about the core of the software.
"I love Excellence@Tech for many reasons”, says Nita Skenderi, Software Engineer at Celonis in Pristina. “Through these sessions, each of us can grow and learn new things in our own time, but also share these with the rest of the team, so we learn even more and the whole team grows together. I especially love how I can use this time to learn new technologies or concepts that I might need for my next task, which in turn helps me grow by allowing me to tackle more complex tasks with ever-growing confidence. I also enjoy that these sessions give us time to explore ideas on how we can improve our project technically or even work on side projects that could benefit the product or the team's development life-cycle. I really appreciate that Celonis has an understanding that giving us this time to invest in ourselves will only reflect positively on our work and therefore on the company's overall success. The best team wins, but a team is only as strong as its weakest link after all."
Reason 8: Get outside your comfort zone
As an engineer at Celonis, you’ll also get to work on projects outside what you might have thought of as engineering - and which have the potential to create a piece of history.
When we received the German President’s Award, the Celonis Engineering team got the chance to showcase our software at the famous ‘Deutsches Museum’ in Munich (German Museum). The challenge for our engineers, UX designers and product managers was to come up with a presentation about the power of Celonis for the general public (the brief said “from age 10 to 90”). The solution would have to guide users, via a touchscreen, through the features of Celonis (from setting up an analysis to taking action), in just five minutes and be capable of working for the next 10 years without supervision.
The approach the team devised to meet this task was to guide users through the story in a stimulating way using an example taken from everyday life. So we have chosen to tell the story of two passengers whose flight had been delayed and explained how Celonis would have helped the airplane take off on time. It was an entirely new way of working and thinking for the team and one that taught our developers a lot.
Reason 9: Advance your reputation in the academic Process Mining community
As part of the Celonis Engineering team, you’ll become an invaluable part of the global Process Mining research community. We present at many high profile conferences like SIGMOD, C++ Con Berlin and the ICPM conference, and we foster exchanges with many experts in the academic communities for Process Mining and data processing. For example, we regularly discuss new trends in the Process Mining community with Prof. Will van der Aalst, AKA the ‘Godfather of Process Mining’ and Chief Scientific Advisor at Celonis.
Exchanging ideas with the global Process Mining community - as an expert about a software product acknowledged as state-of-the-art - gives you the opportunity to explore new challenges and creates room for growth and personal development.
Reason 10: Become part of a diverse team
At Celonis we believe that diverse teams create the best results. To make that possible, the Celonis company language is English and we are proud of our international teams, working together across borders within a truly collaborative culture.
It’s not all about work, of course. Work is where we often meet like-minded people, people who inspire us or challenge us to think differently and grow. That is certainly the case for Senior Product Manager Nicolas Ilmberger: “Most of my colleagues here at Celonis have become friends”, he says. “That makes work fun and really helps when the pressure is on - we know we can rely on each other. And after work, there’s a culture of spending time together, which helps strengthen and deepen those friendships.”
We’d love to get you on board
To further accelerate our hypergrowth, Celonis is continuously looking for new talent for its Engineering and Product organization. It’s as much about attitude and drive as it is about specific competencies. We want to hear from you, if you are: …
Rock-solid in your understanding of algorithms and data structures and believe that logic and mathematical understanding are the basis of your creativity
Curious to expand your coding and programming skills with the top-paying languages
Keen to take your skills to the next level in an Agile project and product development life cycle
Interested in joining or leading a team of developers
Looking to work for an employer with continuously high customer satisfaction ratings, with continuously benchmarked and highly-rated product performance
Seeking peers who challenge themselves and their teams in the day-to-day work
Eager to contribute and publicly share open source codes and projects
Passionate about coding and programming
Drawn to work with peers who developed Celonis’ patented PQL technology, the industry leader
Drawn to a small company ethos but with development opportunities for everybody
Drawn to working for a values-lead company with flat hierarchies
Have a look at our openings in the Engineering and Product organization and feel free to contact our Engineering & Product recruiters for an informal chat about how you could fit into the Celonis story and what it’s really like here: Lorena Rebenciuc (l.rebenciuc@celonis.com), Lisa Oberhofer (l.oberhofer@celonis.com) or Ben Towers (b.towers@celonis.com).
by Martin Klenk, Co-Founder and CTO, and Team Celonis
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