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Tallinn, Tartu, Barcelona

Senior Back-End Engineer - Client Tools

Senior Back-End Engineer - Verification Tools

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Tony brings more than a decade of legal experience to his new role at Veriff. He joins Veriff from Calm, where he held the role of senior director of commercial legal. Prior to Calm, he spent five years at Slack in increasingly senior roles. As the second attorney hired at Slack, and the first commercial attorney, he scaled the commercial legal team to support the growth of the business from $30M to more than $900M (2021). He also spent more than four years at Salesforce supporting the commercial negotiations for salesforce.com's early stage and emerging businesses. 

Welcome to the team! How did you first become familiar with Veriff and what drew you to the company? 

My former manager is an advisor for Veriff, and before I was even prepared to explore new roles, I had a conversation with him in which he went out of his way to praise Veriff’s leadership team and its product. His excitement was infectious, and when he learned that Veriff was looking to hire a commercial legal leader, he offered to make an introduction, which I gladly accepted. My attraction to the organization was all about the people and the opportunity. Everyone I met through my interview process was humble, smart, collaborative, and invested in making the team and organization successful. I was instantly motivated to work alongside everyone I met. Not only that, I felt that Veriff’s mission of building trust in a digital world resonates with my values.

What excites you most about your role at Veriff?

I’m energized by problem solving. One of the exciting aspects of being part of a startup is that there are constantly new requests, requirements, regulations, issues, concerns, objectives, etc. to be addressed. I approach each of these projects as a great learning experience and an opportunity to collaborate with new departments and individuals that I ordinarily wouldn’t interact with.

What’s your impression of working at Veriff so far?

It is invigorating to work at Veriff. We celebrate our successes, and we are part of a culture where it’s acceptable (and expected) to make mistakes and learn from them. At Veriff, individuals are empowered to identify inefficiencies and drive adoption of new practices to make the organization more productive as a whole, and are encouraged to create personal connections with our colleagues that go beyond our work.   

What does your typical work day look like as Head of Commercial Legal at Veriff?

Fortunately, I’m an early riser, because the majority of my team and the departments that I support are in Tallinn or London. I start my day between 6-7 a.m. local time (Denver) and take my first few meetings with my morning coffee. Once Europe is (mostly) offline, I turn my attention to my U.S. team, any ongoing projects, and any Slack messages I may have received during my morning meetings. If time permits, I find time for a workout or a walk in the afternoon before I pick up my son from daycare.

What are you most proud of in your career thus far?

I’m proud of my decision to leave my comfort zone and join Slack. It has set me on a career path I’m very thankful for. I’ve been fortunate in my career to work at excellent companies. I was not looking to leave my previous employer when the opportunity to join Slack presented itself; I faced leaving an excellent manager and a supportive and fun team, but I ultimately felt the need to challenge myself and explore the opportunity at Slack. That decision allowed me, and in many ways forced me, to grow more as a person and as an attorney. The payoff has been more than I could have imagined, as I now have an incredible network of talented colleagues and attorneys to draw from, and it put me in the position to join the talented group of individuals at Veriff.

Alright, on to some rapid-fire questions. What are your hobbies outside of work?

I enjoy cooking, playing golf, wine tasting, running, traveling, and chasing around my two sons, Beau and Roman.

I sang in the Men’s Glee Club at Kansas State University, and I once made the final rounds of the American Idol regional tryouts while I was in law school. I was (justifiably) eliminated when I forgot the words to a Garth Brooks song.  

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain! He is an excellent storyteller. The book speaks to entrepreneurs, and to anyone who likes to cook or travel.  

The Rewatchables. It’s a podcast focused on rewatchable movies, why they are or were important, the highlights and best scenes, background on the casting and filmmaking process, and how they aged.

Mac. I got my first Mac in 2011, and I haven’t thought about a PC since.

If you could choose any other job or career in the world, what would it be?

A professor at a university. My mother was a teacher, and if it weren’t for her pushing me to try a different career path, I would probably be preparing for a classroom full of high school English students.

Special. Right now, Veriff teams are energized, aligned, and hungry to prove ourselves as a superior service.

What would be one piece of advice you could pass along to someone trying to kick start their law or tech career?

I would advise anyone, but especially attorneys, to focus on their brand. If you’re able to build a brand as someone that is helpful, a critical thinker, a creative problem-solver, honest, direct, etc., you will have more opportunities to build relationships, which is not only great for your own self-esteem and morale, but will also set you up for future opportunities. 

We are proud to welcome Tony Gatterman to the Veriff team as our new Head of Commercial Legal. He will support our sales and partnership organizations and take our procurement and contracting processes to the next level. Following stints with Slack and Salesforce, Tony brings more than a decade of experience providing corporate legal counsel to Veriff. Read on to learn more about him!

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Meet Tony Gatterman, Veriff’s new Head of Commercial Legal

Veriff

Our People

Mariano Semelman is the Head of Data Science Platform at Veriff. He is originally from Argentina, but he moved to Europe in 2018. After living in Berlin for three years, Mariano decided to live and work in Barcelona, and shortly after that, he joined the Veriff team. 

He has a huge passion for data science. In his free time, Mariano likes to research and learn about various random topics on the internet. We recently had a fascinating conversation about his career, interests, and life at Veriff.

Let’s kick things off with your professional life. Tell us about your first job experience in your field. 

I started working in data science during my university years in Argentina. My first role was to be a Data Analyst. There I had various projects taken over. One of them was matching users’ addresses to their real-life addresses to pinpoint their latitude and longitude. 

This was before Google Maps existed. Nowadays, it’s much easier to use the service, but it was an exciting challenge to work on something like this back then. 

Working with this company helped me to set my career in this direction and think more about the field of data science. Because of this experience, I understood more details about the area, which gave me more insights on what to focus on in the future. 

I learned a lot about personalization, recommendations, search and rankings, email marketing optimization, etc. At the same time, I had a lot of flexibility to explore different tools with the proper guidance from the management. 

What’s the story behind you moving to Europe from Argentina?

It happened in 2018 when I worked in my previous company, OLX Group. I was a Senior Data Scientist at that point. 

This company was setting up a shared service in Germany, and my role was a good fit for the project. With this in mind, I decided to move to Berlin and continue my career there. 

After that, I advanced within the OLX Group and became a Data Science Manager, which was a great professional experience. I worked with three different types of markets, which gave me a lot of helpful knowledge and experience in my field. 

In 2021, I finally decided to move to Barcelona from Berlin and have a base here. I did it with the same company, and I’m thrilled with the choice so far. 

Great! Let’s talk about your current company now. How did you find your way to Veriff?

When Veriff decided to start operations in Barcelona and open the office here, one of my old colleagues, Duncan Steblyna (VP of Product), approached me to ask for various details about this city – where to look for talent, what are the good areas for office space, etc.

This is how I learned about Veriff as a company. I did more research about the company, and after conversations with Veriff team members, I felt aligned with the mission and decided to apply to join. 

On the other hand, the Veriff team was looking for someone with a similar background, so I decided to take this opportunity and start a new career journey. 

What are the biggest challenges of being the Head of Data Science Platform here?

As the company is growing fast, many challenges have also come up for our team. 

In our case, it is essential to consider how to scale the architecture to support many people simultaneously working on the same components. We must ensure that the overall experience is smooth and that our solution meets users’ needs. 

As the team grows, we should think about the most effective ways to organize teams and set up systems that make it easier for everyone to work on tasks they are responsible for. 

Which one of Veriff’s values resonates with you the most?

It would be “always come up with a solution.” I have always enjoyed working in an environment where people offer their solutions to various problems in the company. It makes the process easier and more enjoyable for everybody.

It is essential to surround yourself with people that have a problem-solver mindset. I think that’s one of the most significant components of Veriff’s success. 

Thanks for the answers! Let’s move on to the rapid-fire questions now. 

One of my biggest hobbies is researching different things. I love reading and exploring various pages on Wikipedia. I have an app on my phone, and I use it daily. I always try to find different ways to learn about new things that are related to the field of my interests. 

I also love doing sports activities like climbing and playing video games in my free time. 

One of my favorite authors in fiction books is Ursula K. Le Guin. I enjoyed reading “The Dispossessed” and “The Left Hand of Darkness” from her books. 

If we talk about more technical books, I recently read “Clean Code” by Robert Cecil Martin. I think there is very useful information for everybody working in the field.  

I’m a part of a community called MLOps in Spain, and they have a podcast where they invite various interesting guests working on ML Ops and ask how they are working, their challenges, and what their everyday work-life looks like. 

There is also another podcast called “Revolutions.” There they talk about the history of revolutions in the world, and I find it very interesting to learn more about those topics.

If you weren’t a data scientist, what would you be?

I would do something related to Farming and Gardening. It would be interesting to have my own mushroom production or something similar. 

What would be your advice to everyone who wants to kickstart their career in data science?

Don’t let mathematics scare you. Learning math and understanding the science behind numbers is a lot of fun. Once you get used to that, then it gets pretty stimulating. 

Whenever you have an idea in your head, try and go for it. It might not work the way you imagine it, but it will surely leave good knowledge for you that you can use for other projects. 

So, don’t be afraid to fail and go for the project you feel the most passionate about. This mindset will surely help you advance in your data science career. 

Mariano Semelman is the Head of Data Science Platform at Veriff. He is originally from Argentina, but he moved to Europe in 2018. After living in Berlin for three years, Mariano decided to live and work in Barcelona, and shortly after that, he joined the Veriff team. We recently had a fascinating conversation about his career, interests, and life at Veriff.

Education

A blog interview with Veriff's Head of Data Science Platform

Meet Mariano Semelman - A conversation with our Head of Data Science Platform

Technical

To get readers up to speed, let’s talk about your professional life. How did you choose this career path?

As a child, I would tell my parents that I wanted to be an observer. At the time, I had no clue how it would translate into a career path, but I remember that I loved to spend time looking at things and trying to figure out how they worked. 

As I grew up, this motivation led me to study Physics for my bachelor's degree, then do a Master's in Artificial Intelligence, and finally pursue a PhD in Neuroscience. 

Now, as a Data Scientist at Veriff, I find myself looking at large data sets and figuring out which algorithms can best extract certain information in order to automate efficiently processes at Veriff products. I would say this career path is close to what I, as a child, liked to do.

Interesting! Let’s dive deeper into your PhD experience. How did you enjoy life in the academic world?

Already in the last years of my degree in Physics, I knew I wanted to do a PhD. Typically the subjects in a degree or master's only scratch the surface of the concepts they touch on. This was one of the main reasons I wanted to do a PhD, to go deeper into a topic of interest and potentially discover something novel. 

At the end of my degree in Physics, I got interested in complex systems, and I was fortunate to find the laboratory of Prof. Gonzalo G. de Polavieja. At the time, he had recruited an excellent group of physicists and biologists working together to understand the rules of interaction of animal collectives (e.g. schools of fish) using mathematical models, which really got me interested. So, I did my PhD in Neuroscience at the Champalimaud Foundation on the application of deep learning techniques to extract, analyze and model the behaviour of fish collectives. 

Photo: Paco teaching at Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon.

One of the highlights of my PhD work was the development of idtracker.ai, which is a deep learning-based multi-animal tracking software that identifies each animal in a collective and tracks their positions over time from a video.

Besides all the technical skills that I learned during my PhD project development, these academic years have been an unbelievable personal growth experience for me. I met plenty of smart and interesting people, improved my communication and organizational skills and above all, learned to stay positive on negative results, which science is full of. 

You have also been giving lectures to other PhD students. What are the biggest challenges for you to share your research and knowledge with other students?

Most of the teaching I’ve done about my research is related to showing students how idtracker.ai works and how to use it in the best way possible in their experiments in summer courses. Explaining the inner workings of software that one has dedicated three years of thought in 3 hours is quite challenging, especially because part of the audience are biologists with little exposure to the deep learning world (although this gap is getting smaller). 

What I’ve learned is that if one manages to give a motivating overview of the bigger picture, then students get hooked on the topic and understanding the details becomes more attractive to them. The challenge of explaining how to use idtracker.ai would be less of a challenge if the students got some basic details of the inner workings. 

For example, suppose students understand how important the image condition is to perform a classification task using a convolutional neural network. In that case, they will be more careful when recording the videos of their experiments or setting the parameters needed for the system to extract trajectories with high accuracy.

Great! Let's now move to your current job at Veriff. How did you find your way here?

My experience, which I believe is shared by many PhD students, is that the PhD is quite intense, especially in the last few years. This means that if you are not careful, you end up with a pretty messed-up work-life balance. So, I knew I needed a rest from academia. Given my skills and experience in machine learning, I thought it would be fun to work in this industry on a company level too. 

I had spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to identify animals from videos. Therefore, I was very interested to know how this would work with people in a real-world scenario. So, Veriff looked like a perfect match for me, and that’s why I decided to continue my career in this company.

What does your everyday work life look like?

Because of the pandemic, I got used to remote work a lot, and I really like it. When I started working at Veriff, I was delighted to discover that the company had taken a flexible hybrid approach to work, which suits my lifestyle. 

At work, I spend most of the time in front of the computer coding and looking at data. Mainly, I analyze the results of ML experiments or have meetings with teammates from other departments.

Before the start of my work day, I often go for runs early in the morning. Throughout the day, I try to take short breaks to rest my eyes and stretch my body. 

Which of Veriff’s values resonate with you the most?

I consider myself a pretty proactive and creative person, and I love being able to put my ideas to work. Besides being the only way to test whether my intuitions are correct, I believe that encouraging people to be active at work is the best way to find novel solutions to problems. So, I would say that the value “Ideas are free. Execution is priceless” resonates with me the most.

What are the challenges to being a Data Scientist in a company like Veriff?

Veriff is growing fast, so making sure that our products use the most accurate, reliable and robust models is crucial for the success of the company. One of the biggest challenges is to make sure that we test our models with data and conditions as close as possible to the production ones. This helps us understand that the effort done during the development of the model is worthwhile and improves our product. 

In my free time, you will find me running, playing music, taking photos or reading a book. Also, I dedicate some hours of the week to doing data science work for the NGO crowdfight.org, which helps create scientific collaborations. 

Thanks! Let’s move on to the quickfire questions now. 

Two of the books I enjoyed a lot in the last few years are "Sapiens" and "Home Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari. I enjoyed reading about his fresh view of history and the possibilities for the future of humankind.

My favourite one would be a Spanish podcast called “De eso no se habla” (We Do Not Talk About It). They interview people with interesting stories about topics that are taboo in Spanish society. 

If you weren’t an engineer, what would you be?

I would probably be a professional musician. I’ve played music since I was 7, and my passion for it has not faded after all these years. I love performing live, but I also love studying and teaching music. 

I use a PC for work and Mac as a personal computer.

What would be your advice to anyone who wants to kick-start their career as a Data Scientist?

Nowadays the internet is full of tutorials about coding in different languages, however, the best way to learn is to start project development yourself and dedicate time to it. Recently, I discovered an NGO called CorrelAid, where junior and senior data scientists help other NGOs with data engineering-related problems. I discovered that it is an excellent environment for future engineers to learn from more experienced ones. 

Meet our Data Scientist – Paco Romero Ferrero. After having multiple years of experience in the academic world as a PhD researcher, he joined our team in March 2022 to face new challenges and grow as a professional. 

Paco is a Data Scientist at Veriff. After having multiple years of experience in the academic world as a PhD researcher, he joined our team in March 2022 to face new challenges and grow as a professional. Paco is originally from Spain, and he enjoys working remotely from different parts of the country. Recently, we had a chat about his career, life in academia, and working at Veriff. In his free time, he enjoys playing musical instruments and doing different sports activities. He also helps an NGO that creates scientific collaborations with his skills as a Data Scientist. Enjoy!

This is a tech talent blog post about Paco Romero Ferrero who is a data scientist at Veriff. 

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