Why Sofia
We evaluated four CEE cities for a dedicated AI & ML hub. Sofia won on a combination that's hard to find together: a growing pool of ML-specialized graduates, a timezone that overlaps with both our Prague team and DACH/UK client hours, and a cost base that let us hire more senior people per budget than a Western European hub would have allowed.
Hiring our first team
The first four hires took longer than planned — we underestimated how much of Sofia's ML talent was already deep in academic research roles rather than product engineering, so we adjusted the pitch toward applied, client-facing project variety instead of competing purely on salary.
What we learned in six months
- Pairing every new Sofia hire with a Prague-based engineer for the first project cut ramp-up time roughly in half
- Client-facing calls work best scheduled in the late-morning overlap window across Sofia, Prague, and DACH
- Local university partnerships turned out to be a better hiring channel than job boards for junior ML roles
What's next
We're doubling the Sofia team's headcount this year, with a focus on computer-vision and applied-LLM specialists to support the growing manufacturing and automation side of the business.