Pros
If you can't find a perfect job, create it - the more you get to know the place, the more you see the both sides of the coin of the workplace - after 1+ year in AVSystem I can say one thing with confidence: if you're ambitious, if you're willing to have the initiative to contribute and shape this place and if you're looking for a great team to work with - look no further, this is a place for you. Speaking as a Scala Developer and Scrum Master - I find the technologies (Scala / Mongo / Redis / Kafka) great and the domain (highly-available distributed system with hands on network / telcos / device management) challenging. You're working truly end-to-end with the product - from discussing and implementing features to troubleshooting potential problems on production. We have code review, we write extensive automated tests and we have QAs in teams. There is low employee turnover, so you'll have senior developers in your team with 3-8 years of experience in this company. We have a pretty flat organizational structure, so you won't find most of corporate headaches there. We're growing in size though, so this means you'll have various career opportunities here - you can: * follow senior technical path and contribute to our internal / open source libraries (scala macros mastery guaranteed) and guide / teach others * go devops way and help us with internal virtualized cluster / containerization of production deployments / addressing our growing horizontal scaling demands * connect hard and soft skills to go managerial / business way. As for the people & culture - during my own recruitment I've asked each recruiter what do they like the most in their position and each one of them answered "the people I'm working with". After 1+ year here I can only agree :).
Cons
* We're a fast growing 120+ company, so if you prefer clearly defined procedures, structure and boundaries of larger company, where you get a well defined ticket in your subsystem part and implementing it ends your list of responsibilities, this might be not for you * Our internal infrastructure is still not perfect - our DevOps and Admins are addressing the problems, but at the moment of writing there are occasional annoyances * You won't be working on a totally greenfield product - clients will issue bugs to fix, ocasionally you will be working on a deadline and depending on a product after some time you might have second-line-of-support duties during your working hours 1-2 days every 2 weeks * There is a reputation about our interview process being too challenging - we're listening to the feedback, but we won't give up on extensively testing our candidates to ensure our team is strong - come and see for yourself :)