Starting my engineering journey

My name is Mahoor. I was born in a small city in the north of Iran, moved to the capital (Tehran) to study mathematics and computer science when I was 18, continued my studies in Paris at Sorbonne, and left academia about three years ago to start a professional career here in Germany. At MobiLab I work as a Fullstack Engineer. Initially, I was only focused on backend engineering, but gradually it was expanded to DevOps engineering, cloud infrastructure and designing and developing cloud-native applications and platforms.

Before I joined the team a friend of mine worked (and is still working) at MobiLab. We had regular exchanges since our time in the university and he was always inviting me to start a career in software engineering. As someone who never thought of having a professional job before getting a Ph.D., it was a difficult decision to change the course of my life. I was not sure if I would find myself fit in a 9-to-5 job if I would find it challenging and interesting, and if I would have a meaningful contribution.

MobiLab seemed to be an environment that would give me the comfort to explore my potential. I had interviews with the Director of Engineering and Managing Directors at MobiLab and felt like they are very forward-looking and focused on the growth of the company and there will be room for me to grow as well. Finally, I decided to take this opportunity and unlike my initial expectation, it was a very smooth transition.

"MobiLab seemed to be an environment that would give me the comfort to explore my potential."

developer story - mahoor cloud engineer

Growing with MobiLab

I joined MobiLab exactly when the company’s massive scaling started. In the beginning I had the chance to get to know everyone closely. During the past two years we grew to almost double the size in terms of the number of employees. I still try to have close contact to almost everyone and this is something I appreciate in MobiLab. Although we are massively growing, we care about keeping our culture high and having a friendly environment. I spend a lot of my time with colleagues at MobiLab who became my friends.

As I said, I started as a Backend Engineer. But since the very start I had the opportunity to learn a lot of things beyond just backend development, including Cloud Services, Infrastructure as code, Terraform, Kubernetes, etc.. Along the way we also strengthened our partnership with Microsoft which gave us the opportunity to dive deep into Azure services by taking certificates and more important than that, having first-hand experience in our projects. There’s a long list of Azure services which I worked with during multiple different projects, including Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Synapse, Azure Databricks, Azure Keyvault, Azure SQL Server, Azure App Service, Azure Functions and much more.

What I like about working at MobiLab is the diversity of projects and customers we have. Not only it gives you the chance to work with different technologies, but also you get to know existing aims and challenges in different industries. In just the past two years I worked on a couple of interesting projects which I can mention here:

We worked on our data archiving solution called Archivum, specifically implementing blockchain timestamping and integrating with Bitcoin blockchain, to provide zero-trust audit proofs as a feature.

I also worked on designing and implementing an IoT solution for one of our customers who is an international pharmaceutical and laboratory equipment supplier. Almost every lab on the planet and even outside the planet (on the ISS) is using their equipments, and they had the vision to connect their smart devices to a cloud plaftorm. It was an interesting challenge to design and implement a solution for them on Azure, using Azure IoT Hubs and Device Provisioning Service.

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Looking into the future

Working at MobiLab is a unique environment, where I feel I really have the intellectual freedom to bring new ideas for each project and work on innovative solutions. Our way of working is shaped by our company culture and virtues: Ownership, Passion, Compassion, and Humbleness. There certainly will be even more opportunities to learn newest technologies and work on challenging projects. For me in particular, I can see myself diving deeper into our concept for ontologies as part of data integration platforms in the near future.

If you are interested to know more about what we’re doing at MobiLab, feel free to reach out to our HR-team. Wednesdays are our open office days and I’m happy to enjoy a slice of pizza with you and talk more about my experience at MobiLab.

Thank you for reading my story.