In our employer insights series, Aengus McClean, senior vice-president of AOL Ireland, talks about his company’s hiring plans and the ultra-competitive engineering environment in Ireland.
AOL’s major project is to do with advertising. One of the core businesses of AOL is its platforms, and a large number of the company’s Irish-based engineers work on those platforms.
“At the moment we’re recruiting for a number of roles,” explains McClean. “Mostly engineers with two to four years’ experience. But also, because of our processes and the automation we have within our processes – and our continuous integration systems – we are looking for a large number of QA automation specialists, as well.”
Engineering is a space McClean considers very competitive when looking for the right hires, with the three to five years’ experience sector particularly challenging – however, it is scale that will prove very important in the coming year.
“Scale to us is hugely important here,” he says. “In the AOL Platforms group, we would be serving billions of ads a day and we would be gathering terabytes of data a day. Everything is about scale.
“Things that work in test environments, in relatively small audience groups, don’t necessarily work or scale correctly. You can’t throw hundreds of machines at a problem, you need the right architecture, too.”
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