An inside look at our new office in Argentina

Not long ago, we announced the opening of our new office in Argentina. In today’s instalment of our Spyrosoft People series, we’re meeting with Jagoda Łoś and Carla De Stefano to follow up on how our new site has been growing since then and what the future holds.

If you’re interested in joining Spyrosoft in Argentina, see what roles we’re currently hiring for on our career page.

How is the technology landscape in Argentina shaped and what factors influence it?

Carla De Stefano: In Argentina, technology has been evolving steadily over the years with the strong support of the government, especially in the areas of education, women in tech and business grants. There’s a wide range of good technology universities that educate talented professionals who also speak good English. From a business perspective, there are certain tax benefits for tech companies, for example, a special law has recently been introduced to help businesses reduce labour costs. All these factors make Argentina-based tech companies perfect partners for Silicon Valley giants.

Why has Spyrosoft decided to open its office in Argentina?

Jagoda Łoś: The idea to set up a new Spyrosoft office in Argentina first came up about a year ago. Why Argentina and not Colombia, Ecuador or Chile? We chose Argentina for our first base in Latin America because we already had trusted business partners there who we could count on. Also, as  Carla mentioned, there are many benefits to opening a business in this specific region. Buenos Aires is a kind of “Silicon Valley” in Latin America.

What is more, we have Carla – the recruitment Rockstar. The moment she joined us was a jumpstart – without her, we wouldn’t have been able to set up our new team so fast. She’s been a great support to me from day one. She knows the market and people – she’s a real big fish – and I’m glad she’s with us. Also, her sense of humour is terrific.

How many people are currently working in our Buenos Aires office, and what are our plans for growth for the next 12 months? What talent are we currently looking for?

Carla De Stefano: We’re currently focused on preparing our structure for the team growth. We started recruiting in February this year. So far we have 10 people onboard. Our target is to reach 50 people by the end of the year. This number is not set in stone, though, and our goal may change as the market changes too.

Regarding the open roles, we’re looking for almost any tech role, mostly Developers (both backend and frontend), but also, DevOps, QA engineers, etc. Some of the roles, like WebGL Developers, are pretty rare in Argentina, so we’re looking for potential candidates willing to be trained and learn new technologies.

What makes our office in Buenos Aires unique, and what are the benefits that we offer employees?

Carla De Stefano: From my perspective, when I’m talking with a candidate, I’m trying not only to be informative, but also very clear and transparent. I’m always stressing the fact that even though we’re looking for people to join this huge European company employing more than a thousand tech specialists, we’re just taking our first steps in Argentina, which also has some benefits.

We’re creating the same culture and nice atmosphere that you can experience in our European offices in from scratch in our Argentina office, of course adding some local flavours to it too. Many of us have worked together before, so we’re making a close-knit team.

We offer contracts in dollars, which is a very important benefit for Argentinian employees. We’re currently working remotely, but we’re taking steps to open our office in Buenos Aires. However, our team members will still have the opportunity to work remotely from any part of Argentina.

Jagoda Łoś: An interesting fact is that the first three employees who joined our Argentinian branch were women.

Carla De Stefano: The empowerment of women is a huge issue, not only in the IT industry, which has long been dominated by men. I remember reading research on the topic from a few years back, which stated that only 16% of women chose IT education at universities. We, as a company in this industry and in this specific region, need to take care of this.

We try to increase the visibility of women in our recruitment process. My personal approach is to be fair, but being fair is sometimes pushing female candidates forward so that managers can take their profiles into consideration. We’re very happy that we’re moving some of our female candidates forward in the recruitment pipeline, not only because there are fewer women candidates, but sometimes it’s also a matter of comfort, being used to something that shouldn’t be like that. Our goal is to change that.

Jagoda Łoś: I’ve been around for a while at Spyrosoft – it’s been five years already – and one of the greatest things about this place is a unique atmosphere and awesome people. You can feel it every single day.

My goal is to create and maintain the same good spirit in the Argentina office. The beginnings are already similar, as the very first people joined us from recommendations, just like it was in Europe. We’re currently planning to create a coworking space, so we’ll have an opportunity to spend time with each other. Two weeks ago, we organised our first integration event with wine tasting. As you can see in the pictures, it was great!