TRAFI, the Vilnius-based makers of urban mobility solutions and an award-winning app, held a hackathon for Lithuanian Cambridge and Oxford students last week. TRAFI’s Marketing Manager Regimantas Urbanas suggests that is was a great way to introduce the company and its technological challenges to the community of top Lithuanian minds that will soon enter the job market.

The 'TRAFI Challenge' for 9 undergraduates from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge took place at company headquarters in Vilnius. Students had to find their way to forecast exact public transport arrival times from a historical Vilnius transport data set. R. Urbanas suggests a solution one of the teams discovered was reminiscent of TRAFI’s current model, and yet other two teams found new ways to solve this problem.

“Our CTO and co-founder Jurgis Pasukonis is a MIT graduate, and so his presence at the company has led to certain hiring standards. We already have a couple of Oxbridge graduates working at TRAFI. This helps us a lot as developers and other professionals then consider us to be a “high-end” employer. At the same time, we know that significant communities of bright Lithuanians thrive abroad, at and beyond universities such as Cambridge and Oxford. We also know that salaries is not a decisive factor when it comes to choosing an employer – it’s all about challenging projects, career progression and professional development opportunities, and also the people that surround one. For this reason, we decided to hold a “TRAFI Challenge” for Oxbridge graduates. Obviously, we want to hire the brightest and most talented people in the market, however, most of the participants were students in their first years at Cambridge and Oxford. But we wanted to show them that major global challenges are already on the menu in Lithuanian companies. At the same time, we don’t expect them to quit their studies and immediately work at TRAFI, however, we believe they shall become both ambassadors of our company in their circles and the ones that spread the word that top technologies to work on are already available at home,” R. Urbanas says.

TRAFI’s CMO also suggests that though the HR market is competitive in Lithuania, it’s still dominated by major foreign IT centers that offer safe and very decent jobs.

“However, some developers, engineers and analysts want much more than that. They want to make decisions, they crave for top tier responsibilities and data to work on. They wish to make a difference. I believe we already have a few companies in Lithuania that can offer this. And the more they grow and the more successful they become, the more expats will return to pursue their careers here in Lithuania. The whole ecosystem would benefit from this,” R. Urbanas claims.