Francesco, or Frans, is originally from Italy, but he moved to the Netherlands a few years ago to attend his MSc in Artificial Intelligence in Utrecht. Before that he did a bachelor in Computer Science in Italy, and an Erasmus exchange in Leiden.
He decided to stay after his studies because he liked living abroad, but also because “the career opportunities are much better here compared to Italy, at least in this field.”
He got acquainted with Owlin by striking up a conversation with one of the employees at a meetup, after which he decided to apply for a job as data scientist. His motivation: “I figured that a data-centered company would be interesting to work at, compared to other realities where data is not the core-focus.” But he also found the environment interesting because it’s very entrepreneurial, vibrant, and fits with his personality. “I’m curious and self-reliant. Being self-reliant is an important trait in a place like Owlin, because people are not managing you all the time. You need to be very proactive and take ownership of the situation.”
He’s now working on the back-end side of the infrastructure, dealing with a variety of tasks that concern data manipulation and processing. “That spans from crafting Elasticsearch queries to coming up with a technique to deduplicate our articles. It’s a bit of an R&D role in a way.” Working at Owlin allowed him to improve his technical skills, but helped honing his soft-skills as well - he says he has a greater sense of ownership now, is more organized and a much better team player.
And when it comes to the Owlin team, he really enjoys how diverse it is - saying, in a very Frans way: “Different personalities and backgrounds contribute to achieve a results that is bigger than the sum of the individual parts.” As you can see, in addition to data, he also has a way with words.
So why should you work at Owlin, according to him? “Because it allows for a lot of freedom in the way you tackle the technical challenges you face. I think the environment is interesting and dynamic, and tests your abilities from many sides at once”.