The Swiss Scholarship That Led Lukas to beBit
Lukas Schmid, Lead Senior Machine Learning Engineer, describes his unusual route to Japan and why he's happy to be at beBit.
Lukas Schmid, a multilingual machine learning engineer from Switzerland, had traveled to Japan before. He’d enjoyed Japan’s nature, traditions, and technology, but eventually wondered: what would it actually be like to live and work in Japan, rather than just visit?
To satisfy his curiosity, in 2019 he applied for a scholarship granted by the Swiss-Japanese Chamber of Commerce (SJCC).
The program included six months of studying Japanese at the full-time Japanese school. And after that, the program included just working at a Japanese company for at least six months.
The scholarship didn’t tell participants which Japanese company to work for, though. “The program doesn’t provide any of the work, or initially it could have also been an internship. So it’s down to the recipients to actually search for a job, which is usually the hardest part,” Lukas explained. At the beginning of his search, Lukas applied to a range of Japanese companies of all sizes.
“But in the end,” he said, “what I really liked about beBit was the product. The product is very interesting. . . . USERGRAM allows you to observe user behaviors on certain customers’ websites.”
USERGRAM accomplishes this by collecting users’ clickstream data—a digital breadcrumb trail of details about how users look at and interact with websites. “It allows you to analyze [users’ clickstream data] in different ways,” Lukas said, “and see where certain users have been on a certain website, until they have purchased the product or watched a movie or whatever they’ve done.”
According to Lukas, USERGRAM can be compared to Google Analytics, but is tailored for clients to help them understand individual user journeys. “So let’s say you want to see a user who has purchased the product, or you want to see how many users have purchased the product,” Lukas said.
You say, ‘Okay, this month, 500 users have purchased the product.’ In USERGRAM, you can now drill down and see each of these peoples’ experiences, like which pages they’ve visited, and which paths they’ve taken through the website.
There are also filtering features to find similar users and identify patterns. “Let’s say a thousand users wanted to buy that product, but 200 failed at buying the product. Why did they fail? [USERGRAM clients] can find the reason.”
“So that’s for the product side,” Lukas said, “but I also really like the startup vibe. . . . Not sure if you can still call it a startup after five years!” he laughed.
He explained what he meant by “startup vibe”: “You can really go into every field, and there are many places where I can learn something, and people are really open to change as well.”
You can say, ‘Hey, I see the CI/CD is kind of slow. Maybe we can try this different library.’ And people are just like, ‘Yeah, go for it!’ That’s really nice to see. That’s really refreshing.
“Everybody is super friendly, and if you have a question, you can just ask, and people will take their time to explain.”
Lukas also appreciates beBit’s easy-going approach towards work roles and team management. “I’ve always been on the feature team,” he said, “but we’ve definitely collaborated with the other teams.” These collaborations help the developers explore other opportunities and learn new skills.
“If you think, ‘Oh, somebody wants to work on a slightly different feature,’ or that feature team now suddenly has a big project and they need more support, then we just say, ‘Okay, you go work there for three months or something, and help on their project.’
“And then they come back. Or sometimes they stay,” Lukas said with a chuckle. “Yeah, both happen. I think that’s also really important for career growth. It’s quite flexible there.”
We try to keep the bureaucratic mess as [limited] as possible.
beBit’s flexibility has benefited Lukas in other ways. “In my case, I became a father last year. I was able to take four months paternity leave,” he told us, “which is really awesome.
“Yes, according to the law, you are allowed up to one year, and the company cannot say no. But there’s a difference between ‘cannot say no’ and [your manager saying], ‘Yeah, sure, go ahead.’ There’s quite a difference there. So it was quite easy and it wasn’t much of a discussion, which is really nice.”
Most of the developers work remotely full-time, and Lukas has started doing the same. “The commute from here [to the office] is about 40 minutes. It’s not super long, but now in the morning I can drop [the baby] off at daycare, for instance, and be back at nine, which, if I was at the office, wouldn’t be possible.”
That being said, Lukas appreciates the company office. “The office is a benefit. The office is actually really nice. It’s also located in Otemachi, right by Tokyo Station. So it’s really convenient.” The office even includes two nap rooms, where employees can take a quick snooze on the provided beds.
beBit’s friendly and flexible work environment has spurred Lukas’s career. He joined the company in 2020 as a Machine Learning Engineer, and was promoted to Senior Machine Learning Engineer in 2021. Now he leads his own feature team.
According to Lukas, there are four engineering teams at beBit, with about five to seven engineers each, and a separate designer for the UI. “How we’re organized . . . we have a product manager, product owner, and then the team,” Lukas explained. “And usually the whole communication directly with the user, or with the clients, is [conducted] by the product manager.”
This division of labor is partially because beBit’s clients are primarily Japanese, whereas the development teams mostly speak English. It’s also because beBit carefully monitors client feedback for the developers.
“If the team would need to respond to each client’s feedback,” Lukas said, “it would be really tough. . . . Yeah, no features anymore. You wouldn’t get the time! So it’s nice to have that slight shielding, or consolidating, and really prioritizing as well.”
Once the feedback is delivered, though, Lukas feels that developers must proactively create solutions. “It’s initially the product manager’s responsibility to say, ‘Oh, we have this problem, what are the ways we can solve it.’ . . . . Now the product manager by themselves can propose ways, but also, you’re an engineer, so you know the technical [side], and you have the toolsets to solve things. So, your knowledge is also required. You really have to work together.”
If you only work on the feedback loop, you’re not really innovating anymore. You also need to have a vision. What new features do we want to provide that could cover an issue the client has? That maybe the client themselves didn’t fully realize that they have?
Once the decision has been made, the team gets to work. “I think the longest timeline we try to have is a quarter. Maybe two quarters, if it’s really a big feature,” Lukas said. “What we’ve done previously with [something like] a journey feature is, we run the POC [proof of concept] in a quarter, and the next quarter we start implementing it. Then we try to at least release it and get feedback.”
From that point on, the cycle gets quicker. Depending on the feature size, usually it should be much quicker, because the sprint length is two weeks. The best case would be every two weeks you get feedback.
At the same time, beBit does its best to avoid feature creep. “We’ve released features and realized the users are actually not really picking up on them. You can try and improve the feature, or you can kill the feature at that point.”
This happened just recently, according to Lukas: “We were working on other things, and after a couple of years, we realized, ‘Hey, we maintain this feature, how many people are actually using it? Do we want to still invest in it?’ And now we’ve decided, ‘No, we’ll get rid of it.’ We removed it because it costs to maintain, even if it’s just there.”
If you’re considering applying to beBit, Lukas offered some specific advice. “I think, first off, brush up on your coding skills. That’s just common sense.”
More to the point, Lukas stressed that applicants shouldn’t try to inflate their qualifications. If you mention a language on your CV, the beBit team will expect you to know it thoroughly.
“If you write ‘Django,’” Lukas said, “we will ask Django-related questions.” And if you don’t know the language? “Be blunt about it and say, well, I don’t know, but I’m happy to learn. But if you just say, ‘Yeah, I know Django,’ and you try and fake your way through the interview . . . we will realize.”
The technical assignment at beBit prioritizes everyday coding tasks to reflect the developers’ actual workloads, with just a few computer science questions included. Another important tip from Lukas: the technical assignment tool “has an integrated Google search. It also has AI detection, so you could see if somebody tried to use AI. And if you’re really smart, you can still outsmart that, of course. But just don’t copy-paste code if possible. . . . You can Google stuff, real reference stuff, but try not to copy-paste because it might look like you’ve cheated.”
Lukas himself joined beBit more than four years ago, but is content to remain for the foreseeable future. beBit’s good management, friendly colleagues, and emphasis on avoiding “bureaucratic mess” have all earned his loyalty.
I think many people change their careers after three or four years. It’s quite common, but for me, as long as I can keep learning new things, I’m fine.
He appreciates the opportunities he’s found with beBit, and sees himself continuing to grow as an engineer with them. “I want to be able to acquire new skills, maybe develop new, different parts. And as long as I can do that, I’m pretty happy,” he said.