Draivi has grown quickly this year, with new roles and new faces almost every month. But growth is only half the story. The other half is what it actually feels like to step into a company that’s still very much building itself.
We asked four of our recent joiners, Heidi, Data Protection & Information Security Lead, who joined in May 2026; Janina, Growth Hacker for the German market, also on board since early May; Alex, Machine Learning Specialist, also on board since May; and Maria, Visual Designer, on board since the beginning of June, to tell us what their first months have looked like.
Why Draivi?
For all four, the appeal wasn’t a perfect job description. It was the size of the opportunity and the feeling of the people behind it.
Maria was drawn to how open-ended the role was: “What caught my attention was how broad the role was and how much room there seemed to be to influence and shape things.”
Heidi felt a similar pull, from a different angle: “What attracted me to Draivi was the combination of a young culture, a strong can-do attitude and a company that is clearly still moving forward and growing.”
For Alex, it came down to ownership: “The chance to build and own machine learning and computing infrastructure from the ground up at a fast-growing fintech.”
For Janina, it came down to a single conversation with her team lead in the interview process: “Somewhere in that conversation, I realized that the people here are a lot like me: dedicated, passionate, humorous, and refreshingly non-judgmental.”
Trust from day one
If there’s one thing all four agree on, it’s how quickly responsibility was handed over.
Janina was creating ads and running live social campaigns before her onboarding was even finished: “Nobody sat next to me double-checking every post before it went live. That is ownership in practice, not just a word on a slide or something written in a job posting.”
Alex describes the same pattern on the technical side: “I own the machine learning model entirely. From early on I was trusted to decide the approaches and how to solve the problems, not just handed tasks.”
Heidi describes a similar pattern in a very different domain: “I wasn’t given a ready-made playbook and told to follow it. Instead, I was given the responsibility and freedom to understand where we are, identify what we need, and start building the way forward together with the business.”
Maria’s version of this was about shaping direction rather than daily execution: “I was trusted quite early on to start making decisions about visual direction and to rethink how we approach design across different brands.”
Growth, felt from the inside
Growth doesn’t just show up in headcount. It shows up in how fast things move day to day.
Heidi notices it in how fast decisions move: “Decisions can happen quickly, new ideas appear constantly, and you can actually see the company evolving around you.”
For Alex, the contrast is stark against his background: “My background is all research organizations and universities, where things stay static. Draivi is the opposite: new people joining regularly, operations still being built for the long term.”
Janina feels it as both a practical and emotional shift: “Something that worked perfectly fine a month ago might already need adjusting because the team or the workload has changed. Growth like this brings a kind of energy that is hard to fake.”
The steepest learning curve
For all the trust and momentum, there’s still a lot to figure out early on.
Maria’s biggest challenge was the scale of it: “Understanding the whole Draivi ecosystem: the different markets, brands, websites, existing ways of working and how everything connects.”
Alex’s came from a different direction: navigating Draivi’s operational workflows and its large, complex database, with Sebastian a big help along the way.
For Janina, the curve was industry-specific. After 15 years of experience elsewhere, fintech itself was new territory: “Financial topics need to feel trustworthy and approachable at the same time, which is a different balance than in other industries I have worked in.”
What surprised them
Some of what surprised them had nothing to do with the job description.
Alex was struck by how central AI is to how the company works, and how actively people work on improving their own efficiency with it.
Heidi was struck by how flat the company feels despite its growth: “Even though the company is growing and people have very different responsibilities, the organisation still feels quite flat.”
For Janina, it was something more personal: “I did not expect to find so many people who light up talking about the same niche interests I do. It fits me perfectly, and it made settling in feel a lot less like work and a lot more like finding my people.”
Looking ahead
So what do they want to have built a year from now?
For Maria, it’s “a strong visual foundation for Draivi’s brands.” Alex hopes to have worked with everyone in the company in some capacity, and contributed to at least one area beyond revenue prediction. Heidi wants information security to feel “like a natural part of everyday decision-making rather than separate compliance topics.” And Janina is thinking about the people who’ll come after her: “I hope to have helped drive continuous growth and found ways to streamline our tasks and documentation, so onboarding becomes easier for the people who come after me.”
Growth across eight markets means a lot of new people building Draivi at once. Maria, Heidi, Janina, and Alex are just four of them.
Keep an eye on our upcoming open roles, you might be who we’re looking for next!
