Tech
Jan 17, 2022
Starting my career at Wolt — meet Valeri from Analytics
If you hear someone mentioning Wolt, you probably think of food and grocery delivery first. But behind the scenes we have a team of over 5000 people who work hard to make Wolt great for our customers and partners across 23 countries. 🌍 Wolt is not only a delivery app for restaurant food, groceries and other items. We’re a technology company building a logistics platform. In practice this means building a broad range of technologies that work seamlessly together to provide a world-class experience for our customers and partners, as well as our internal teams.
Wolt’s over 35 product teams include hundreds of talented engineers, designers, data scientists, product leads and more. Our product teams are based at our tech hubs in Helsinki HQ and Berlin, while we also have some team members working remotely across Finland, Germany, Estonia and Sweden, too. Every year, we welcome interns to join our teams to play an important part in making Wolt better for our customers, partners and internal teams.
Interns at Wolt get to dive deep into how we build products at Wolt. Interns are warmly welcomed to actively take part in the “behind the scenes” action of making software that millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of partners use on a daily basis. As an intern, you’ll be a member of one of our 35+ product teams, learning and working side-by-side with our engineers, designers, product leads and more. We’re proud that most of our interns get an offer to join us full-time after their internship. Our internship program is like a springboard to join Wolt permanently. 🚀
In this blog we’ll hear from Valeri who joined Wolt as a Business Intelligence Intern last year and stayed with us ever since in a permanent role. Let’s hear more from him:
How did you join Wolt at our HQ in Finland? 🇫🇮
I was working in a bank as a graduate when a friend of mine, who worked at Wolt, just couldn’t stop talking about the company, so it was inevitable that I looked into the internship program! I had recently graduated with a finance degree, but was getting more and more interested in working with data. I didn’t apply straight away for a full-time position at Wolt because I didn’t think that I was experienced enough, so this kind of program was a great way to smoothly transition into one.
Interestingly enough, though, I originally applied for an internship in Wolt’s data science team, as that’s the second Master’s degree that I’d just started studying. Naturally, I thought that data science is what I’m interested in, but during the interview process as we discussed my take-home assignment, the interviewers sent my profile to the analytics service team. They thought that I’d be a much better fit as a Business Intelligence intern. In hindsight, I’m grateful the interviewers saw over team borders and pointed me to this position — I feel that things turned out in the best way for both me and Wolt.
What did you work on during your internship?
My main task was helping the teams at Wolt to understand and use the data when they have some specific business-related questions, which is also the main purpose of our analytics service team. In other words, we support the business decisions of our employees by making sure they have appropriate data and corresponding documentation available to them.
In terms of the tools I used, in the very beginning I started using Looker, which is the main Business Intelligence (BI) tool we currently use at Wolt. Since Looker is based on SQL, it was rather easy and intuitive to start working with. Also, it prepared me for other tasks further down the data pipeline like creating new datasets and making data aggregating scripts run automatically.
And what do you do now at Wolt?
I’m still in the same analytics service team! Once you develop your skills and gain more confidence in working with data, you can always go deeper into the data pipeline. In this position, you’re kind of a generalist since you get to see a lot of Wolt from the data point of view. You learn a lot on a daily basis, but the fast pace of developing new stuff at Wolt means that you’ll always have more to learn. We also have the chance to specialize in some specific domain depending on our interests (like Wolt Market, customer support and so on), and since we’re always on the look for more people who work with data, there’s always an opportunity to narrow down your field. As you progress, you get to work on more complex tasks with tools like Python, Kafka, Airflow and others. So that’s where I’m at now and I’m really enjoying it!
What made Wolt an interesting company for you to join as a graduate?
Wolt operates in the hyper competitive tech industry, so you can be certain that when it comes to building software, Wolt puts tech first. So to me as a recent graduate, this signalled that during the internship I would learn the most relevant and modern tools which will remain valuable later in my career as well. That gave me a lot of confidence to apply.
What was the best thing about your internship? What was most challenging?
Working in the analytics service team, you have a good overview of the whole company. This is the challenging part as well, because you have to be somewhat of a generalist most of the time and know a bit of everything about everything. However, in my opinion, at the beginning of your career, it’s good to be this kind of a jack-of-all-trades as you get to learn about so many areas instead of just focusing on one thing. That was so incredibly important as it was not closing any doors for me — as a graduate it’s hard to know from the get-go what exactly you’d want to focus on. So having to already choose your specialization when applying for the first job might feel limiting.
At Wolt, I’ve had the privilege to see the many different use cases various teams have for our data, and on the other hand, how this data is being generated and transformed into usable format by the data teams.
What have been the biggest learning experiences from a technical point of view during your time here?
Since I have a business background, it was seeing the development or organisational level of Python and the clean code structure, since you don’t necessarily see any of this in business studies. The code is really modular, clean, and easy to read compared to what we did during our university courses, which was maybe a bit more ad hoc. And this isn’t just concerning Python — overall our code is smooth, easy to use and easy for others to develop. Coworking is also very exciting, since it’s a good way to understand and learn. So, in general you learn to apply different approaches when coding.
Why did you choose to continue with Wolt after the internship?
For many reasons, actually. We have really cool people here at Wolt, and I enjoy working with my team. Our team lead is easy-going and chill, and I have a lot of freedom — I’m trusted to know what I need to do and to balance out the workload myself. I really value how convenient it is to work here. Also my onboarding process was very smooth. Having started my internship remotely, I had everything that I needed to start working from home from day one — really good equipment, office furniture, and so on. Altogether it was a smooth package! 🙌
At Wolt I learn something new every day since we use top-notch tools, stacks, and systems. I feel that one of the best things about Wolt, when compared to smaller companies, is that it has excellent developers and bigger teams, so you get to see what all the other engineers do, as well as see different aspects of data. There’s a lot you can learn here.
What tips would you have for those who are thinking of applying to this year’s internship program?
Make sure to read the role requirements and remember that even though this might be your first position, it’s really important to think about what your interests and values are aside from just getting the job. I’ve come to realise that it’s also a lot about the team and the company you join, not just the role itself. If the company is interesting and has a good work culture, you can be sure that you’ll be offered a possibility to develop and discover yourself and eventually also work on more things that interest you. I feel like this is the case with Wolt.
Any final thoughts?
Just like with any other new job, the beginning might be quite intense since you have to take in a lot of new information. I myself was a bit scared of tackling projects by myself — as a business student I mostly worked in groups. But when I started the internship, the team chose the appropriate tasks for my development and supported me whenever needed. The nice thing was that you can easily separate the tasks based on your experience and at first you start working on smaller tasks adding more complexity as you go. And since we have buddies at Wolt, there’s always someone lending a helping hand!
