Our Prague office, launched just six months ago, is already well-connected with other Sky locations. Backend teams collaborate closely with London, while the frontend department, anchored by great teams in Lisbon, has been launching exciting new features, like the recent Olympics experience that delighted sports fans. As the office steadily expands and new team members join, our work is evolving and gaining definition as we settle into our roles. Being part of the Sky family has been an incredible experience so far.
In this post, we’re sharing insights from a short interview with Václav Zůna, a Senior Engineering Manager leading several frontend teams. Václav is a great example of an engineering manager who effectively oversees teams across multiple countries.
What is your role in the Sky team?
I’m a Senior Engineering Manager for Android, iOS, and Chromecast. I have five teams, and they are in Lisbon and Prague. There are 4 additional Frontend teams in Prague that I support. Together we contribute to Sky's apps across multiple platforms, including Android, Fire Tablets, iOS, Android TV, Apple TV, Smart TVs, and the Web. Our work spans a wide range of devices to ensure a seamless user experience. This year, as an experiment, we also released a version of our app for Android Auto and are exploring other emerging platforms.
What do you enjoy about working at Sky?
I enjoy working on an application that I use myself, and streaming is an interesting technical challenge. Sky does this globally.
Which applications are supported by your teams?
We're developing Peacock in the USA, SkyShowtime in Europe, and Showmax in Africa.
What is your Prague’s team contribution to Sky services?
The teams here are mostly focused on the user's experience from the moment they start streaming, but we also support additional app features outside of playback, such as live channel selection.
What interesting challenge did your teams work on recently?
For the 2024 Olympics in Paris, we worked on enabling users to watch multiple sports simultaneously on the same screen and seamlessly switch between which one is focused and plays audio.
What challenges are you looking forward to in the near future?
We're preparing to expand the number of streaming apps running on our technology, which will bring a range of challenges, particularly around efficiently scaling both engineering and processes.
How is innovation and learning supported in your teams?
In engineering, we reserve dedicated time for people to explore new ideas and experiments. Additionally, we have several initiatives at the department and company levels, including Spark sessions, Hackathons, and the upcoming Launchpad event.
Do you plan to grow your teams?
We're growing steadily at the moment and expect even faster growth next year, including the creation of an additional Mobile team.
What qualities do you look for in the people you hire?
We seek people who wat to work in an international environment and value cooperation, as collaboration is key to succeeding at this scale. We're also looking for people who aren't afraid of tough technical challenges and enjoy finding efficient ways to tackle them.
Interested in joining Václav's team? Explore the open positions for frontend developers in his team!
