- 0.1 Tell us more about GreenSteam, what is your core business?
- 0.2 What kind of technologies are you working with on daily basis?
- 0.3 How does the recruitment at GreenSteam look like from the CTO’s perspective? What competencies and skills does he value the most?
- 0.4 What can you say about the communication between the tech team and the business?
- 0.5 What are the biggest challenges for your Tech Team?
- 0.6 Do you have an idea of how to scale your team?
- 0.7 What kind of roles are you looking for currently and why?
- 1 Check the latest job offers at GreenSteam
Reducing fuel waste and the carbon footprint of shipping through machine learning – this is the mission of GreenSteam, the company from the Faroe Islands. How are they doing it? What kind of experts do they need? You will find out more in this interview with Marcin Kalinowski, ML Team Lead.
Tell us more about GreenSteam, what is your core business?
We are a company dedicated to bringing 21st century AI solutions to the shipping industry. We apply our expertise in machine learning and naval architecture to help vessel owners and operators consume less fuel, be more cost-effective, and more eco-friendly.
We have been established in 2007 by a couple of scientists from the Faroe Islands and have ever since grown into an international organization with offices in UK, Denmark, and Poland. Our main area of expertise is building and applying vessel performance models for both indicating past energy use and predicting how savings can be obtained in the future.
What kind of technologies are you working with on daily basis?
Since we are centered around data analysis and machine learning, our main tool is Python. Our entire infrastructure is built on a Kubernetes cloud and we leverage a lot of technologies that help us achieve our goals: for data processing, we use Argo, for machine learning, we use a variety of libraries, both open-source and our own.
Our frontend is built on React, the backend is based on Django. Everything is scalable and we also build a lot of microservices based on Flask/FastAPI.
How does the recruitment at GreenSteam look like from the CTO’s perspective? What competencies and skills does he value the most?
Our CTO is Chris Airey and (speaking from a team leader perspective) he is a great guy to work with. Emphasis is on “with” and not “for” because Chris’s management style is being an advisor and enabler who concentrates on removing obstacles and facilitating a good collaborative process.
That brings us to what skills he values (I think): first and foremost he likes open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, ability to communicate and cooperate
“Our development teams work with Product Owners and Business Analysts on a daily basis”.
What can you say about the communication between the tech team and the business?
We are Agile, therefore we talk to each other a lot 😉 Our development teams work with Product Owners and Business Analysts on a daily basis, and our devs are also sometimes involved in sales calls to make sure the technical perspective is properly presented to the business side of things.
What are the biggest challenges for your Tech Team?
We are still a relatively small-sized organization (with a very flat structure) that is emerging from its startup culture into a fully mature technical organization. Couple that with a lot of projects, contracts, and deadlines and you end up with a challenging albeit fascinating work environment.
“(…)we strive to foster a culture of trust and expertise so that we don’t have to occupy ourselves with tracking how many commits or lines of code someone has produced”.
Do you have an idea of how to scale your team?
Everyone has a lot of freedom on how to do things, that’s the first thing.
Secondly, we are using Scrum, so all development work is properly discussed among technical peers – we don’t have stories that exist simply because they were requested.
This put the developer in control of how to do their work, working together with the business side of the organization to create a set of acceptance criteria. It also puts the developer in ownership of his work, from inception through coding to production integration (we have well-developed CI/CD).
Thirdly, I guess that we strive to foster a culture of trust and expertise so that we don’t have to occupy ourselves with tracking how many commits or lines of code someone has produced – we care about results through good collaboration.
What kind of roles are you looking for currently and why?
We are mainly looking for Python developers/Machine Learning engineers to help us fulfill the growing demand for GreenSteam’s products and services. We have also recently included new PO’s and business analysts and so our organizational capacity grew.
