Dauren Malayev

Since Dauren won a six-month internship in the American IT-startup in the competition of the Shakhmardan Yesenov Foundation, he was thinking about things to face in the US, if he would be able to apply his knowledge and what new experience he would gain there. Did the work in Silicon valley meet the expectations of a 28-year-old Kazakhstani?

To begin with, why did you become a developer?
I was born in East Kazakhstan, but moved to Almaty when I was a student of the 8th grade, as I had entered the city physics and mathematics gymnasium. I had loved exact sciences since I was a child, and when I bought a computer studying in my 5th grade, I realized that IT was my cup of tea. My mom helped me, of course. Special thanks to her for that. Later I enrolled in a bachelor degree program at the KBTU, then won Bolashak scholarship and was accepted for the master’s program in the Dublin Institute of technology. Upon graduation I joined the team of Chocotravel.com —at the time it was a small startup, which had a staff of just three employees. Later, we grew to a staff of 150 specialists, and I was responsible for the IT direction.  Now I am a PhD student at the KBTU.

How did you manage to win in the Foundation’s competition?
In the Facebook newsfeed I came across the post about the competition. I visited the web site, read the description, and I had a feeling that my candidacy perfectly matched all requirements. Straight off, I collected a package of documents and applied for participation. Next there were several stages of the competition and victory!

What was your internship experience in the US?
I arrived in San Mateo in mid-April this year. Time passed quickly, and now it’s October and I’m back in Kazakhstan. The first days there were very exciting. Everything looked new: the country, people, company, etc. I studied the project and began to work: I was a qualified Software Engineer with a focus on back end. The guys — and there are about ten of them in the team — were engaged in creating a B2C platform to allow businesses to communicate with customers using sms. I developed the functionality on the back end, i.e. the server side carried out technical support for the customers of the startup and corrected the shortcomings in the system, that we call “bugs” using the professional slang. I helped my colleagues with startup and integration of online payment system, Stripe. I visited customers to solve technical problems.

What have you achieved?
In the six months that I worked in the US, I learned new technologies needed to improve the current code. Besides, I was also responsible for integration with sales-CRM system pipedrive (pipedrive.com). Now it helps the startup to track new clients in a structured way and work with them in a timely manner. I was lucky to make acquaintance with many software engineers in Silicon valley, including those working in the big four (GAFA – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and Microsoft. I learned a lot from them, and I have no doubt that this knowledge will help me in my professional development.

As usual, the interview ends with a simple question: “what’s next?”
As a result of the internship, the company offered me an option contract, under the terms of which I have the right to buy out a certain share of the company in the future. So, it turns out that I am interested in the growth of the enterprise. Vimchat will be further inviting me to work as required. In the meantime, I went back to the company where I worked before the internship. I will be engaged in Research and Development. I have already demonstrated the experience gained in the valley to my fellow developers and everyone in the office. The presentation includes 80 slides.