Day in the Life of a VP of Engineering: Meet Attila!

In this month’s edition of our Day in the Life series, we are featuring VP of Engineering, Attila Vass. He is a valued member of our Executive Leadership Team, and for well over 4 years now has been the driving force behind our enterprise solution, Rapport.

What are your main responsibilities at Speech Graphics?

As VP of Engineering, I lead the research, development, deployment and maintenance of our Rapport SaaS platform. I manage a team of very talented engineers, who are responsible for the continuous improvement of our offering.

What does a typical working day look like for you?

First and foremost, coffee! And then perhaps some more coffee; I’ve just become a dad again, and while it’s probably the best job in the world, I’m not always party to the best night’s sleep at the moment! 

Then standup meetings (part of the agile approach) to review progress on key tasks with my team, work through any blockers and set goals for the day ahead. Luckily, I have the best Project Manager there is to help me with that.

As the day progresses, I tend to shift my attention from the tactical to the strategic, considering medium and longer term priorities in context of the critical path for the business, whether those be major innovations in the tech and user experience space (and we have quite a few of those), keeping us in line with the industry changes, or increasing our operational readiness and compliance initiatives.

It’s also extremely important to ensure that I’m across technical documentation and code reviews, and to that end, I still like to get my hands dirty with coding and writing design documents too.

In such a fast-paced sector, it’s also critical that I read technical news to keep up-to-date on emerging trends. I especially enjoy keeping an eye on the Metaverse initiatives lately. Coming from the Games Industry, I find it fascinating how some of the latest challenges have been long solved, yet are being “rediscovered”.

What would you say has been your biggest achievement during your time here?

I would say my biggest achievement to date has been the successful rolling out of our enterprise solution, Rapport, as a SaaS solution.  That includes the technical design and architecture, recruiting the teams, putting the right development processes in place and supervising the overall progress. 

Fun question to end - what's your favourite movie and why?

I am a big fan of everything Sci-Fi, especially Star Trek. A few other favourite movies include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, Enemy Mine and Idiocracy. Why? I enjoy projecting my mind into the future and looking back on the present, as if it was the past. This kinda helps me with validating some of my decisions at work, charting better paths, and it’s something that is at the very core of Sci-Fi.