At SuperAwesome, we’re committed to ensuring that team members grow and up-skill within their team, and the company as a whole. In this Women in Tech series, we’ll be looking at the career paths of various women working in tech within SuperAwesome – from engineers to product managers to everything in between.
Atena studied software engineering at university, and began work as a software engineer after her fourth year. Two years after joining SuperAwesome, she became the Engineering Lead for one of our biggest products, AwesomeAds, the only ad platform built for the global kids industry.
Here, she talks about how her career has evolved within SuperAwesome, and what she does to make the internet safer for kids.
What does your role involve?
I am the Engineering Lead for AwesomeAds; at SuperAwesome, this is the first step towards Engineering Management. I spend around 70% of my time as an individual contributor, coding. In the AwesomeAds team, we work with technologies that are best suited for the problem we are solving, while making sure they align with the overall company tech stack.
At the moment we have components written in Typescript, Java and golang and we deploy our services on kubernetes. We encourage TDD and BDD practices and try to have a high percentage of code coverage in order to have more maintainable code. We often do pairing, as well as code reviews, to ensure we keep a high standard for our codebase.
The rest of my time is spent working with team members on their personal development plans, in order to help them achieve their career goals.
What’s your favourite thing about your job?
Our mission, and our culture.
Kids today have an online presence starting from a very early age, often when they are too young to understand the concept of online privacy. With AwesomeAds, we make sure that brands can safely reach kids across the biggest digital content marketplace in the world. This mission is one of the favourite parts of my job: I feel like the work I do is meaningful, relevant, and contributes to making the world a better place.
Pioneering a technology sector is uncommon, and it requires quite some effort, and a lot of determination. I am surrounded by great people at work, and this makes a huge difference to me.
At SuperAwesome, we make sure we hire people who add something new and valuable to the company culture. This has led to a diverse and multicultural environment where people from all over the world get together to make the internet safer for kids. I have lost count of the different nationalities and accents in my team, and every now and then I get surprised by some cultural celebration I wasn’t aware of (that usually comes with lots of yummy food!).
If someone was interested in working in kidtech, what advice would you give them?
We share a lot of knowledge regarding kidtech. To learn more, follow us on:
But kidtech is a new industry, and we don’t expect you to be an expert on privacy or kids. If you’re interested in working with us, check out our job listings here.
If you’re interested in staying on top of technology and kidtech news, we publish several kids industry newsletters which now have over 10k subscribers reading monthly. Sign up now!
