A day in the life of Artur Krochin, Senior Software Engineer

Artur came to the UK in 2010 from Lithuania. He studied Mathematics at Warwick University, before coming back to London to start his career. Prior to joining Vortexa, Artur worked at Monzo. He was a backend engineer in the team that launched Monzo Flex, their buy-now-pay-later product. Before that, he led the revamp of the anti-money-laundering system at Revolut as a machine learning engineer. Fun fact: Artur is a massive music fan and is not only taking clarinet lessons but also teaching himself the piano and electric guitar. Artur also likes collecting various musical instruments whilst on his travels, and the last time he visited Bulgaria purchased a traditional kaval, the precursor to the modern flute – though he is still to learn how to play it.

What does day-to-day life in your role look like?

My day-to-day involves pairing with my teammates on the various initiatives our team is responsible for, reviewing pull requests, people management, and refining the roadmap for our pod.

What would you say is the most interesting aspect of your role?

Despite being an engineer, what I enjoy the most about my job is writing proposals and documents. I’ve always been a big picture person, so there’s nothing that brings me more joy than a well-composed proposal with clear diagrams, a justification of business value, and a plan for the next steps. I am currently trying to spread the practice of proposal writing across the company, as I think it’s invaluable!

What was your path to joining Vortexa? 

I really needed to try a variety of roles before converging on what I truly liked. I’ve been a consultant, delivering presentations and Proof of Concepts, trying to win business for our company; I’ve been a JVM and Golang backend engineer; I’ve been a data scientist responsible for customer churn models; I’ve been an analytics engineer and a tech lead; I’ve produced a course on network analytics. Ultimately, I discovered my passion to be the intersection of statistics and engineering, namely machine learning engineering, which Vortexa has ample opportunities for.

What kind of qualities does a person need to have to succeed at Vortexa?

The ability to see the big picture, kindness and not fearing infrastructure alongside a willingness to learn how things work under the hood.

What do you like about the culture? 

What I enjoy the most is the freedom that you get. Having iterated on the OKRs with senior leaders, it’s up to you how you organise your time and deliver.

Who do you collaborate with?

I collaborate a lot with my teammates, product management, and other pod leads.

What are the first three things you do on a Monday morning?

I get ready for my reporting meetings, and then I make a plan for the day. I love stationery, so I always physically write down things I want to accomplish that day and proceed to cross items out as I go along. I also review what I did last week to rebuild the context in my head.

What energises you most about working as a Senior Software Engineer at Vortexa?

Definitely writing proposals and presenting them to the team! The same way that you apply engineering principles such as KISS, DRY, YAGNI to code, I love to see how we can apply them to higher-level structures such as team organisations. My key realisation is that almost everything can be “engineered” or “architected” to a degree.