Working for 8 years in the same IT company is not a joke, especially not for a stand-up comedy enthusiast, who loves coding, leads a multidisciplinary team and whose mantra is ‘stop complaining and start doing’. Find out Grigori’s story.

What can you tell us about your career path within Endava?

My career path at Endava started 8 years ago as a Java Developer.
Since then I embarked on several roles and tried out different frontend and backend development technologies, like Spring, Hibernate, Wicket, Apache Camel, Angular and React.

I have been doing line management of an UI team, coaching team members on their career development options; holding positions as scrum master, development lead and design lead, up to a consultant role. What helped me to have a constant uplift in my career, was maintaining a positive attitude at all times and keeping my hand up when volunteers were needed.

Each role had its own challenges: The Development Lead role required far more technical and analytical skills. I was often on the lookout for the best optimal solution, which, as it often happens, doesn’t just lie on the surface.

Another career shift came with the Design Lead role. In this capacity I was the bridge between the team and business analysts of the project with whom I communicated a lot to clarify all possible cases, agreed on action points and then managed to transform this knowledge into technical terms explaining to the team where, what and how these requirements have to be implemented.

Tell us more about your work at the moment

More than one year ago, I joined the biggest project of Endava in Moldova, which involves more than 100 people who work on innovative solutions for a major UK Payment Provider. The team had to design and build a system that revolutionized an entire industry in the UK. We worked in a complex, but at the same time lean and streamlined Agile framework.

Initially, I was leading a team responsible for the visual part of the system. Later on, once we got bigger, I switched to the Design Lead role. It implied more client communication and less coding responsibilities. The key thing about this project is that it was the most “Agile” project I’ve ever worked on, with no chance to succeed otherwise within the same time limits.

Leading the team who was responsible for the UI part of the project, we worked with some new technologies like Apache Camel for messaging and Thymeleaf for UI components. This project pushed the boundaries of our understanding of teamwork. At some point, there were 10 teams in the project and we faced the challenges of how to work effectively on the same area along with other teams, how to deliver our code, how to share issues and findings, how to reflect all this in Jira, etc. Scrum masters were of great help in sorting things out.