Ouro´s Software Automation Specialist Riikka has a background as a coder and tester, driven by a desire and motivation to learn new things throughout her career.
For many of us, childhood dream jobs included: police officer, firefighter, flight attendant, and hairdresser. Riikka also dreamed of becoming a police officer, but ultimately, engineering studies and a comfortable office job with a reasonable salary were more appealing.
Before starting her engineering studies in 1998, Riikka gained work experience through summer jobs doing yard work, as a trainee at a daycare, and in assembly at Nokia’s monitor factory.
Riikka enjoyed her engineering studies and acquired solid foundational skills for her career. Practical work is an excellent teacher in the IT field, and the education provided her with the readiness to develop and apply what she learned in practice.
During her studies, Riikka worked summer jobs at Nokia, and in her final year of studies, she was fortunate to receive a permanent job offer from Tieto, where she spent an impressive 10 years. Riikka’s main job title at Tieto for nine years was C++ programmer, but she was also heavily involved in testing, both as a tester and in developing and maintaining testing tools. The pipeline she managed in 3G/4G networks kept her particularly busy with the design of new features. In her final year at Tieto, Riikka spent three months coding for the government network and the rest of the time at Itella, working with old programming languages and versions.
Winds of change
The winds of life carried Riikka from Tampere to the capital region, prompting her to search for a new job. Despite numerous job interviews, Riikka experienced bitter disappointment when she was not selected for the positions she applied for. In her spare time, Riikka had studied the Python programming language independently, and soon in 2011, she signed a contract with a company, marking the beginning of her career in test automation. After a quick two-week course on Robot and Jenkins, Riikka found herself learning to create Robot libraries at a client’s site. The misfortune of job hunting had led Riikka to make a poor employment agreement, and thus, after a year and a half of employment, it was time to look for something better. This is how Riikka ended up at the RAY as a technical tester in 2013.
In 2011, Ouro’s current CEO Antti Pohjonen founded a company named Omenia and enticed Riikka to join. Consequently, Riikka changed jobs again after a ten-month stint at RAY in 2014. Initially, Riikka joined Omenia to work on Robot libraries, but soon found herself in the testing team. Quickly, Riikka learned about the issues that can arise when maintaining ten thousand Robot tests and devised solutions to address them.
At the end of 2017, Omenia was sold to Siili Solutions Oy. Along with a few other colleagues from Omenia, Riikka also joined Siili. At that time, RPA (Robot Process Automation) was emerging at Siili, and Riikka wanted to give it a try. She worked on RPA for clients for about a year and learned many new systems that she hadn’t had the opportunity to automate before.
Riikka´s path to Ouro
Nearly two years passed for Riikka at Siili, until Antti Pohjonen reached out to her again and enticed her to join Ouro, which had been founded in August 2019. Riikka started at Ouro in October 2019 as a partner and Senior Software Automation Developer. Riikka did not hesitate to jump back into working with Antti at Ouro, as the employer was already familiar, safe, and known to be a workplace with a good vibe.
At Ouro, Riikka stepped into a new world of testing, now adjusting Jenkins with Groovy. In addition, Riikka has learned a lot about the financial sector and its test automation but also about the operations of a small company including recruiting and sales cases. Learning new things is what motivates Riikka and connects all Ouro employees. Ouro is genuinely a learning organization where skill development is the top priority in the value system of its employees.
Riikka enjoys working at Ouro and is now actively involved in Ouro’s recruitment processes. She strives to identify the hidden potential in applicants—qualities that many interviewers once overlooked in her.