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At Aliz, we believe in empowering our colleagues to shape their own paths and contribute to something bigger. Norbi, our Chief Technology Officer, is a prime example of this philosophy in action. His journey is a testament to continuous learning, adaptability, and the unique environment Aliz fosters.
I began my career as a BI intern at a large telecom company in Hungary after completing my business degree. It was a great place to start my professional life, full of motivating and fresh challenges. Here I could leverage my academic background to answer business questions based on data, like how to increase the uptake of mobile data subscriptions with specific promotions. However, after seven years of steady advancement, I began to feel the limitations of an enterprise environment. That's when I decided to seek a different place with a faster pace, closer to the forefront of technology.
In 2019, I joined Aliz as a Data Science Architect, becoming part of a small, cloud-focused team of about 30 people (now over 100 🎉) with a multinational footprint. The entire Google Cloud Platform (GCP) ecosystem was completely new to me, and the company's strong emphasis on software craftsmanship meant I had to rapidly pick up proper development practices. My team was also just getting established, so best practices weren't yet fully formalized within our domain either. I absorbed knowledge from colleagues and engaged in extensive self-training, using online courses, books, Google documentation, repositories, and reading various articles. I also quickly learned to adapt to external clients and define the architect's role for myself, a role that demanded flexibility and nuance on every project.
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When I joined, I found myself at the very dawn of Aliz's Data Science Team. This gave us a lot of flexibility and empowerment to establish our ways of working, practices, and even the career paths and expectations for data scientists. The core reasons I joined Aliz—building solutions for customers from various industries—have remained constant, but my role changed quite a lot over the years.
I started as an architect and tech lead on projects, and then I became the Head of Data Science, responsible for the success of all related projects. What propelled my move into leadership was that I began thinking beyond individual projects and started focusing on company and team-level approaches. I scaled the data science team in both Asia and Hungary, shifting our team's skillset from core data science to ML engineering and incorporating more application development knowledge as market needs shifted due to generative AI.
I believe that the greater freedom and support I found at Aliz compared to my previous multinational experience, have really contributed to making the above possible.
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A significant part of my growth was my desire to have a more holistic view of technical areas, including data, application development, and infrastructure, rather than becoming an expert in each. My experience with ML projects inherently involved these other domains, giving me a broader perspective. While experts handled the in-depth technicalities, I focused on the unifying efforts. I always enjoyed being in this “translator” role, and this, combined with my involvement in early product development where I bridged the gap between technology and business, ultimately paved my way to the role of CTO. After three years as Head of Data Science, I recognized that my skillset extended beyond data science, and I proactively turned to the management team, asking for a role with greater influence.
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My days are dynamic and varied, you really have to get used to the good old context switch, I’m not going to lie. I act as the link between business and core delivery, but I would highlight the below as my main focuses:
For me, engineering excellence is really about building a culture of continuous improvement. Since becoming CTO, one of the things I'm most proud of is a new technical forum we created. It's a place for us to openly discuss proposals and ongoing projects, spotting opportunities to reuse what we've built already and learn for the future. This in turn makes us more efficient and smarter about how we work, and also has an effect on our business, for example when it comes to project pricing.
If I could offer a piece of advice to my 2019 self, it would be to openly share my challenges and difficulties earlier with Aliz's management, which could have prevented a lot of stress for me in the beginning. Looking back now I realize that they were not there to judge me, but to support me.
Another, maybe more technical: stay pragmatic. Working with Google Cloud means we’re at the cutting edge of tech, but most client needs don’t require the newest tool. What they need is a working solution that delivers value—fast. Early in my Aliz journey, I spent too much time worrying about how to wrap newer technologies into a solution when proven and well-established tools would have been just as (if not more) effective. As a tech lead, your job isn’t always to chase shiny objects—it’s to identify what’s reliable, implementable, and scalable. That’s where the real impact lies.
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We’ve recently launched our new squad setup, a strategic shift shaped by both market needs and internal feedback from team members who expressed a desire for more stability, autonomy, and deeper expertise. In response, the squad model was born: small, focused teams aligned to specific types of solutions, empowered to manage their own work and continuously improve what they deliver. This is part of our broader move from selling engineering hours to delivering solutions with tangible business impact. At the same time, long-term engagements with key clients remain vital to our success as well, of course. These projects offer stability and deep client collaboration, and the knowledge gained there often feeds directly into our solution development efforts.
Looking ahead, I see the AI revolution as both challenging and thought-provoking for Aliz. My vision for engineering in the next 1-2 years is to leverage these technologies to transform our internal operations, allowing our team to focus on truly important and enjoyable work. I want to cultivate an engineering culture where people are self-motivated to pursue innovation and continuous learning, strengthening this as a core value at Aliz. In this future, I believe communication, product, and business skills will become increasingly vital, potentially even more so than purely technical skills.
Ready to carve your own path at Aliz? ☁️ Apply to our open positions here!
