BlaBlaCar, an online marketplace for carpooling, will open a large engineering hub in Ukraine. Ukrainian developers will work on the development and scaling of the marketplace, as reported to AIN.UA by the press service of the company.
Currently, the engineering team of BlaBlaCar in Ukraine consists of about 20 people. By the end of 2021, the company plans to increase the number of technical specialists to 50.
Why Ukraine?
At the end of 2019, BlaBlaCar in Ukraine went beyond carpooling rides and acquired Busfor, the largest bus aggregator in Central and Eastern Europe. That allowed BlaBlaCar to get unique technologies for distribution, booking, and sales of bus tickets, which are the basis of the bus marketplace.
With the help of the team of Ukrainian engineers and, first of all, their expertise, which the company did not have before, BlaBlaCar will be able to scale the product to other countries and regions, including Latin America.
“We know that Ukraine has world-class professionals with great potential, expertise, and experience who are able to build global products. We would like to see them as a part of our team,” commented Aleksey Lazorenko, General Manager of BlaBlaCar in Ukraine.
What the Ukrainian hub will be working on
The team will focus on several tasks:
- The creation of the Global Distribution System (GDS), the system that underpins the bus travel aggregator. The GDS will allow bus carriers to connect to BlaBlaCar and post their trips and passengers – book and buy tickets.
- Scaling the bus marketplace to other countries. BlaBlaCar has over 100 million users in Western and Eastern Europe, Turkey, India, and Latin America, which will get a variety of transportation solutions.
- Working on improving the product, creating, and connecting new features that will maximize the needs of carriers and passengers, and make finding and buying bus tickets easier, more convenient, and reliable.
How to get a job at BlaBlaCar
Currently, there are more than 13 openings for people with technical skills:
- Java developers
- Q&A specialists
- Project managers
- Product managers
The recruiting process at BlaBlaCar consists of several steps:
- technical qualification
- practical task
- several meetings with future colleagues and managers
Most positions are available to work completely remotely.
About BlaBlaCar
BlaBlaCar is a carpooling platform with a website and mobile app for iOS and Android. As of April 2021, the number of BlaBlaCar users exceeds 100 million people in 22 countries, with more than 20 million people making trips with BlaBlaCar every quarter. The number of users who use BlaBlaCar on smartphones (iOS and Android) exceeds 30 million.
BlaBlaCar officially operates in the following 22 countries: Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, India, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
BlaBlaCar entered the Ukrainian market in early 2014 by acquiring the Ukrainian startup Podorozhnyky. To date, the number of Ukrainian users exceeds 5 million people, and Ukraine is among the top 3 fastest growing countries for BlaBlaCar in the world.
