In conversation with Full Stack Engineer, Maksim Ekimovskii

Yesterday, Finland celebrated the 100th anniversary of its independence. To join our Helsinki hub’s celebrations, we spoke to the 100th employee, Maksim Ekimovskii. A full stack engineer and passionate videographer, Maksim tells us about his journey with Zalando so far.

Chillin' out Maksim, relaxin' all cool.

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Tell us a little about yourself. **My name is Maksim Ekimovskii and my native city is Severodvinsk in Northern Russia.

All my life I’ve been passionate about tech, arts and sports of any kind. By day I’m a full stack engineer and by night I’m a software artist, videographer and music lover.

Why did you decided to relocate to Finland? I had a long journey to Finland. I studied in St. Petersburg, but after graduating I moved to Hong Kong to work for a local startup. At that time, I got my first international experience and it sparked my interest to live abroad long term.

Why Finland? It’s interesting because I had opportunities to continue my career in three different locations: come back and stay in St. Petersburg, move to the United States or try Finland. The companies were equally interesting to me, so I was really deliberating what to do. I started my research about quality of life in different cities and set the goal to move to the city from the top 15. I checked such things as health care, public services, safety, financial stability, job market, etc. After awhile I figured out that Helsinki was a clear winner among the cities I could get a working contract in and moreover I’ve been there many times, really liked the environment and knew what to expect.

Zalando Tech – Helsinki hub

** When did you first join Zalando? What were your first weeks like? **I joined in the beginning of July (2017) as the 100th employee, so now I’ve been in the company for 5 months. My first weeks felt like I was in the right place; I could find many challenges, a lot of opportunities and passionate people around, which got me excited to work here. I felt welcomed, made my first friends, and overall had a smooth intro to the company.

What kind of projects are you working on? I work in Team Perimeter, which is a new team in the Helsinki Tech Hub and we integrate partners into the Zalando Platform. We take end-to-end responsibility of the entire integration process and develop new service pages for the Fashion Store, which allows our partners to connect their customers to fashion.

What’s been a personal high in your role so far? Dynamics. Company dynamics, team dynamics and project dynamics. My personal high so far is realizing the impact I can have, developing new soft and hard skills, working with people of different mindsets and ideas you can learn from and grow.

How does Zalando fit in the tech community in Helsinki? It’s really nice to see how well Zalando fits in the tech community in Helsinki. Sometimes there are so many events going on here I miss some. It’s quite regular that we host a tech meetup in our office or my proactive colleagues participate and give some talks here and there.

I personally gave a talk at the Helsinki docker meetup and had an internal Zalando presentation just recently. I saw that people are really interested in what we are doing and how, and now I have an exclusive “Zelsinki On-Air” speaker sticker at the back of my laptop.

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