Dobrý den,
As I write this, I’m sitting in our brand new office on Narodni in the heart of downtown Prague, Czech Republic. After eight years with Pure in California, I moved here with my family to help establish our European R&D headquarters. Pure’s focus on innovation and belief that great engineering talent can be found anywhere in the world has landed me here, and I could not be more excited!
An Introduction to Pure
This year Pure celebrates its 10-year anniversary, and a decade ago we had a singular goal to disrupt the storage market. By rethinking and modernizing the storage platform AND business model, Pure was convinced we could empower customers to get more value from their data.
Data is the new oil – we’re providing the technology to enable our customers to store and make sense of that data. $50B change hands globally every year in the market we’re disrupting, so we have quite a bit of room for growth. We helped create the tidal wave that is currently sweeping the industry, centered around two irreversible trends:
- From traditional rotating disk drives to flash
- From a three-year storage buying cycle to consuming storage “as-a-service,” both inside the data center and in the cloud.
From the beginning, we focused on simplicity – on making our product so easy to use that you never need a manual. This lets our customers focus on innovations such as cancer research, self-driving cars and sending people to Mars, rather than having to worry about managing their storage.
We’re one of the most beloved brands in enterprise IT. Our customers gave us a net promoter score of 86.6 – meaning that the vast majority would strongly recommend us to their friends. By comparison, Apple’s at 47 and our competitors are in the 20-30 range.
Pure is at its heart a software company, building all kinds of different software. There’s close-to-the-hardware system software – think data structures and algorithms that can store and retrieve data in microseconds. There’s cloud-at-scale software – think storing, indexing, and analyzing a continuous stream of 50 TB of new data daily from an Internet-of-things (IoT), 365 days a year. There’s machine learning and AI software to make sense of all that data. And there’s a rich suite of infrastructure and system test software which allows us to release products 3-4 times as frequently as our competitors. All types of software are equally important to us.
Which brings me to why we’re here.
With over 3000 employees across all departments, our engineering organization is large enough that our engineers have a lot of interesting work and the opportunity to move around and experience the different technologies that I described above, but small enough that everyone’s contribution is critically important. So far, our engineering teams are all in North America, with our HQ in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. While we continue to grow those teams, we felt it was time to open up another major hub for us in either Europe or Asia so we could accelerate that growth, which also gets our engineers closer to customers in important markets. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was time zone difference, we decided on Europe. But where?
We spent several months doing our research. We evaluated cities on over 20 different criteria including talent pool size and higher education, the ability to attract engineers from outside the city or country, cost and whether we think we can make a name for ourselves in the local market. The final five were Munich, Barcelona, Warsaw, Athens, and Prague. In the end, Prague won!
We picked Prague because it has great talent, because people from all over Europe want to come and work here, because it has a great higher education system, because of its central location and because it’s simply a drop-dead gorgeous place – that also has incredible beer!
Now let’s make one thing really clear – we did not pick Prague because we wanted to move the work here that the America teams don’t want to do. We said from the get-go that the work here will be every bit as innovative, challenging and rewarding as the work in America. I also want to stress that we fully intend to go big here and hire as fast as we can find great engineers. Prague will make a big difference in our ability to deliver more valuable technology and solutions to our customers sooner.
Join Pure Storage in Prague!
So with all that out of the way, let me get to who we’re looking for. We look for motivated engineers and engineering managers who want join Pure Storage in Prague. Work with the best in the industry, solve incredibly hard problems, be challenged and grow, and join our strong culture of openness, transparency, candor, and common sense. We look for you to help us move ever closer to an idea meritocracy where ideas are implemented because they are great and not because they came out of the mouth of someone with a title (General Managers have bad ideas too!).
If that sounds like you, get in touch with us! We have several open positions and a really cool office to fill. If you’d like to check us out, e-mail vnemec@purestorage.com or simply apply online.
I look very much forward to working with you!
-Dan, General Manager, Pure1
