Employee Spotlight: Emil

Driven, fun, talented, and thoughtful are just a few of the traits of the people who make up our Engineering team. We asked some of our engineering experts to tell us a little more about how they work their magic. Here’s what they had to say about what it’s like to work at LucidLink.

Meet Emil Stanchev

Position: Tech Lead / C++ developer
Joined: December 2017
Location: Bulgaria

Can you share your background and experience before joining LucidLink?

I have always been fascinated with technical challenges and computers. My interest led me to choose to study those topics at university. I attended Sofia University, the oldest university in Bulgaria, traditionally the strongest in the country for mathematics and computer science. My fascination grew from a hobby to something I now love and have grown a strong knowledge in. I started my career at a large tech company, then moved to more dynamic start-up companies. It was interesting because, in these roles, I learned a lot about scalability problems. I experienced first-hand what happens when companies grow rapidly—especially in engineering teams.

What I felt was missing or became most important was working around interesting technical challenges; secondly, I wanted to make more of an impact. This usually happens when you join a company in the earlier stages.

What did you find attractive about starting a career with LucidLink?

Funny story, I reached out to LucidLink by accident. I was trying to reach another contact with a similar name as someone at LucidLink. I emailed them accidentally, but serendipitously, they were also looking to recruit engineers!

What I liked the most about LucidLink, was that the work addressed what I felt was missing in my previous roles. It presented interesting technical challenges and an opportunity to make an impact. Also, the product seemed cool and valuable. I saw the immense potential in it.

I met the founders, George and Peter, and liked their energy. I liked their story behind building the company and a good team with good people. It all turned out pretty well, so I’m happy I made that decision five years ago.

Describe LucidLink in one word.

It’s pretty amazing, as well as dynamic and challenging. We have a friendly team where everyone works toward the same goal.

Describe what a typical day is like for you at LucidLink.

I usually start my day coding, doing interviews, or reviewing code changes by team members. I’ve done a lot of candidate interviews recently, which is great because we’re building a good team.

We typically do stand-up meetings later in the morning so the team can discuss the day’s tasks or focus. I’m a tech lead and have a team of five people. My responsibility is to ensure no one is blocked and that we’re aligned as a team to work together efficiently. We usually go out as a group for lunch and often bring back food for the office. Human connection is essential, and although we are a hybrid team, we still find many ways to connect and support each other.

We usually have design discussions in the afternoon, where I often collaborate with team members in different time zones. We make technical decisions about our current projects in these meetings after carefully considering and discussing all relevant concerns. I also allocate a good chunk of time every day to writing code, which I enjoy quite a lot and like to continue improving.

What type of projects are you working on, and across which teams do you collaborate?

We’re making some security improvements, which are technically challenging but very important because we take security quite seriously. Security is a top priority, and our work constantly addresses ways to make the product more secure as we evolve.

I do work with product management on all the projects that we do. I’ve also worked with design and other teams, such as the support team, because addressing customer issues is our highest priority.

What are some of the technical challenges you’ve worked on?

The metadata streaming project we finished earlier this year. It was very challenging, but we improved a lot about our product. We wanted to support Filespaces with 100 million plus files in them. We did this by making it so that you can stream the metadata on demand in addition to streaming data.

Previously, if you had a large file space with many files and folders, you had to wait a long time to synchronize all the metadata. This is because when it’s millions of files, even if just file names, attributes, directory structure, and other internal metadata, it’s still a lot of data. That was a challenging project. The entire engineering team took part in it, and although challenging, I’m happy we joined forces to push it out as a team.

What is your favorite thing about the Culture at LucidLink?

The people at LucidLink are great. Everyone is helpful and understanding toward each other. I also appreciate the transparency. Leadership ensures we always know what’s happening with the business. Since we use a lot of public slack channels, you can take a look at slack or reach out to a team member to get up to date on what they’re working on. I also appreciate the way we take technical decisions through in-depth discussion.

Are there any industry trends or topics exciting to you right now?

The larger movement of how the workforce is transitioning to the cloud is fascinating. I’m also interested in smart cities. I’m curious to see what future applications we’ll think of to make better decisions and improve the quality of life worldwide. If we can make cities more efficient, we can address traffic, energy usage, and safety needs.

Outside of work, what do you like to do in your free time?

I enjoy reading, traveling, and hiking in the mountains.

If you could trade places with any other person for a week, famous or not, living or dead, real or fictional, with whom would it be? 

I would be one of the Wright brothers! They were aviation pioneers and are credited as the first to build and fly the world’s first motor-operated airplane. I’d absolutely want to experience that first flight.

What is a must-have for you to get your work day going?

I like to have my coffee, especially a cappuccino. I also like to go for walks every day before going to work.

Advice for future engineers.

Never stop learning. You can learn on your own or at your job. It’s important to find companies and projects that will help you develop your skillset. It’s equally important to develop yourself in ways that align with your interests, such as taking an online course, reading books and articles, participating in meetups, listening to podcasts, being a part of a community, or teaching a class yourself.

Want to work together with Emil? Check out our open positions here.