Meet Pawel Skroban, Engineering Manager at Zencargo

Hello, my name is Pawel Skroban, and I am an Engineering Manager at Zencargo.

When I started as a front-end engineer, Zencargo was only about six months old. After working in other startups, I was excited to work for the company during its early stages.

The Role of an Engineering Manager at Zencargo

Zencargo is divided into different working teams, such as the People Team, Product Team, to name a few. Our teams are then divided into smaller groups to help facilitate teamwork and shared goals and solutions. 

As an Engineering Manager, I lead one of the Experience Teams. 

I’m responsible for the current development of our engineers as they build new features. I also help manage delivery and coordination with the design and product teams and synchronise progress with the other Experience Teams. 

Each Experience Team consists of at least seven people: typically four engineers, one product manager, one designer, and an engineering manager. 

Solving Bigger Problems Requires More People

For the Experience Teams, we are always looking for engineers with the drive to solve complex problems and maintain momentum in a startup environment. As far as engineering experience goes, we need people with a background in frontend or backend knowledge in Java, Javascript React, Microservices, to give some examples. 

Building more teams allows us to continue to break barriers a traditional supply chain industry and create better user experiences for our customers.

The Challenges of Scaling Up

The bigger any company grows, the more difficult it is to maintain the culture and values established by its founders. It’s not easy, but that is just as important to Zencargo as disrupting the trillion-dollar shipping industry.

As we develop more teams and recruit more people, we carefully restructure teams and jobs to accommodate everybody in their roles. We want people to feel secure and supported in their work while giving them the flexibility and autonomy to solve problems on their own. 

Proper onboarding is a huge part of that. 

We spend time getting to know new joiners during the interview process, and then we integrate them into teams so they can quickly gain experience and knowledge from their peers. 

Once they’re established and know more about what we’re doing and how we work, their roles might shift if they can thrive more somewhere else. We want everybody to be in their best position to maintain balance and keep everybody’s motivation high.

Consistent Evolution for an Established Product

Our teams aren’t the only thing growing right now.

Every day, we look for ways to increase functionality by building new features and capabilities for our customers.  

The tech platform we use to increase visibility and improve our clients’ shipping experiences has existed and has been working well for a while. But that’s not enough for us here at Zencargo.    

We want to make the supply chain work for people and businesses. To do that, we have to stay ahead of the competition and develop unique solutions that have never been available before.

Currently, we’re scaling our technology as much as our teams. One of our current developments is switching from Monolith architecture to Microservices. This will allow us to serve customers that we wouldn’t have been able to help well enough before. 

For example, we’re working on fulfilling the requirements for bigger companies with significantly larger shipping needs. We haven’t had that capability before, and it’s an exciting challenge for us to overcome.

Growing at such a rapid pace leads to many changes, but every shift we make is to build a better working environment and a higher-functioning platform.

It’s the Best Time to Join Zencargo

We’ve expanded so much during my time here, but Zencargo is on the verge of growing a lot more.

With more funding and more advanced goals than ever, we’re all thrilled about our future.  

This is the place to work if you like learning new things and being a part of something that will genuinely make the world better and more accessible. 

If you’re interested in joining, please take a look at the opportunities at Zencargo here.