Our community was recently enriched by one of the companies from the American-Ukrainian Postindustria Group – Sigmoid Lab, which opened its doors in Split a few months ago.

So let us introduce you to the projects they are working on and the business opportunities they offer, as their CEO Konstantin Mirin and Head of People Operations Suzana Špika Šimera tell us more about Sigmoid Lab.

How did it all begin?

To start with, Konstantin and Suzana revealed to us how the Postindustria Group was created in 2006 in Kherson as a boutique team for product creation.

In the first years, Konstantin recalls, they had no clients, only partners, and investors.

“The business model was very simple: come up with a great idea, launch it, and aim to sell the product quickly.”

It is an interesting fact that, for many years before the war, Postindustria was among the top employers in the southern Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Mykolayiv.

The United States of America as a stepping stone

In 2009, after one of the successful sales of their own product, they realized that the American market offered them a fantastic opportunity, so they moved the company’s headquarters to Los Angeles to take advantage of it.

“Los Angeles is still one of our main markets and we have clients that have been with us since the beginning – almost 13 years now!”

Since then, they have grown and expanded almost all over the world.

“We have colleagues on three continents in 12 countries – Australia, USA, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Spain, Portugal, Montenegro, Turkey, and Croatia.”

The development of their own and client’s products allows them great flexibility for their 130 employees who all live and breathe product creation worldwide.

“We come up with our own ideas and develop them further because we can finance them thanks to the positive performance of other current projects,” explains Konstantin.

Sigmoid Lab in Split

Sigmoid Lab’s projects, as well as those of the entire Postindustria Group, are in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D modeling, web and mobile application development, unreal games, and augmented reality.

As for the company’s arrival in Croatia, Konstantin and Suzana laugh that the reason for everything is that the CEO fell in love with Split. Although said through laughter, this fact is not a joke!

“Split is a really beautiful city, so we wanted to be part of the local community.”

Additionally, Postindustria wanted to diversify its development opportunities, but also stay in the same time zone with most of its employees. Croatia was therefore a natural choice for them because it has less competition than Poland, and thus it is easier to enter the market here as a new player.

In addition, they see AI/ML as a dominant trend, which is why the original plan was to focus on that area, gather a strong team, and establish cooperation with the local community and universities. As they say, that is the reason why they are branded as Sigmoid Lab here.

“Of course, the war in Ukraine forced us to make significant adjustments to the plan, so we are now looking for all specialties, not only AI/ML here in Croatia,” explains Konstantin and adds:

“We believe that, by bringing challenging global projects to Split, we also help the development of the local community.”

Although they are an IT company, the first person they hired in Croatia was actually a senior human resources expert, namely our second interviewee Suzana.

“From the beginning, we wanted to understand the cultural differences and needs of our future employees and offer them a competitive compensation package and concrete opportunities for development,” explained Konstantin.

Interesting projects – satisfied employees

Suzana points out that their employees single out the following as great advantages of their company:

the work in small autonomous teams, the importance of projects, and the overall flexibility of the company.

Working in small autonomous teams enables them to function faster and more efficiently, as well as to better organize their own work and goals.

“As a rule, our projects are long-term, with clients we have been doing business with for many years. However, we are flexible about changing the project if the employee expresses a desire to do so,” explains Suzana.

Considering that Postindustria develops products for its clients that enable them to cooperate with Apple Music, Spotify, Universal Pictures, YouTube, Starbucks, and other globally popular brands, their employees truly have a varied choice of very interesting projects to work on!

Furthermore, they also develop their own products, from which Suzana and Konstantin singled out Giggster – a platform for finding and renting locations for filming movies, series, and commercials, which is currently in second place in the American film industry.

How to become part of Sigmoid Lab and why?

What definitely stands out within the IT industry is the employee retention time in the company:

“In the IT industry, employees stay within the same company for an average of three years, while in our company that number is twice as high. In addition to the aforementioned possibility of moving from one project to another, our employees have an open path, both horizontally and vertically, to progress in their careers,” says Suzana and adds:

“We encourage and maintain development and two-way communication primarily through regular one-on-one conversations and well-established processes within the company.”

As for their plans, it can be said that they are really big – they are looking not only for individuals but also for entire teams together with their leaders.

Their autonomous teams consist of full-stack engineers, testers, designers, and technical project managers.

You can see currently active open positions in the Jobs section of the Split Tech City website. Many other job openings are being prepared, so follow the announcements regularly as we are constantly updating them. 🙂

“We certainly advise interested candidates not to wait for a perfect job description but to contact us with an open application. We easily place quality candidates in existing or upcoming projects.”

Joining the Split Tech City community

We asked Suzana and Konstantin why they decided to join us, and Konstantin explained:

“Because we believe in cooperation and joint growth of the local tech ecosystem.”

We have to praise them a little bit because they have already started to contribute with their participation in the events we organize. During the latest OpenCoffee Split meetup, Konstantin held the lecture “7 ways to kill your digital product”, and this is what he shared about the Split Tech City community:

“It is very inspiring to see such a lively IT community! With numerous meetups, community activities, and interesting event formats that can only be organized in Split, such as the Festival of Technology and Entrepreneurship right by the seaside.”

Thank you for joining Split Tech City, and we wish you a lot of success in your future work!