Creating your own career story: Marijus’ path to success at Paysera
Photo: DELFI
Can you briefly share your career journey at Paysera, starting from the position you were initially hired for?
What were the key factors that contributed to your career growth within the company?
a) Dedication and belief in people. We should all make mistakes, but only once, and learn from them – these 3 pillars are mandatory and should co-exist together.
b) Forgetting the past. Having a white paper point of view allows new perspectives to be drawn, and although it may be risky, it can have amazing results.
How has Paysera supported and encouraged your professional development?
I want to thank everybody who believed in the way we’re working and gave me and my colleagues the freedom to adapt to the business changes. The ability to experiment and apply various techniques, rethink and clean up old technical debt, and the ability to fail allowed me personally and others to calibrate a great model for delivery, which has a huge potential for further growth.
Can you share any specific experiences or projects that you believe significantly impacted your career progression at Paysera?
Working in a position like mine, you can hardly have a backup manager or a colleague that would cover areas the company may be missing at a specific point in time. I had an opportunity to work temporarily as a CISO, as a Security Officer for auditing, as a CTO for regulatory institutions, as a company representative for our partners, and many other roles – which, in fact, can be quite far away from the IT-related activities. They were challenging, gave me a great boost of motivation, and invaluable experience for my further career.
What advice would you give to others who are looking to start or advance their careers within Paysera?
Imagine Paysera as a company, which has enough funding for enterprise-level activities, controlled expenses for profitable solutions, flexible dynamic processes for business changes, professionals and experts as team members, and a variety of positions because of its size – if that’s not a dream job, then I don’t know what is. Don’t be afraid to join, learn, and advance as a specialist in the position you were hired in, or in a new Paysera position if you want changes.
Were there any challenges you faced while at Paysera, and how did you overcome them?
Fintech is a difficult market – we’re talking about an extremely regulated financial industry, and technologically one of the most advanced infrastructures on the web. We must comply with regulations that are created for big corporations and banks – yet to remain small and flexible and maintain a transactional architecture that has to be extremely fast and developed quickly – while retaining reliability, stability, and availability. I was part of this – directly and indirectly, and managing it was crazy; although you have no choice, because your competitors are always waiting for your mistake or slow reaction in the market.
In your opinion, what qualities or skills are essential for someone looking to progress into management at Paysera?
That one’s easy: tolerance of critics and big balls.