Careers – David Claesson, managing director at LiteBreeze
My name is David Claesson and I’m the managing director at LiteBreeze in Kochi. I’m from Sweden, but I’ve spent most of my time in India since 2004. LiteBreeze is now a team of 70+ employees and my responsibilities are:
To recruit the best developers we can find. I hire around 1% of applicants. We are very selective.
To coach and train staff. To ensure high service quality, user-friendly web and mobile applications, and clean scalable code.
To be a cultural bridge between our Western clients and Indian development team.
To develop efficient routines, processes and systems that allows staff to focus on delivering high-quality web development services at reasonable cost.
To manage and retain talent. To listen to the needs of top talent. To offer top talent what they need to be happy at LiteBreeze in the long term.
Our recruitment team and I have designed a strict and selective recruitment process to match the high expectations of our Western clients.
I personally take hiring decisions on-site in India when it comes to all project leaders, web developers, web designers, app developers and other programmers.
Communication and service quality are important factors when hiring. Our clients’ representatives are often IT specialists, architects or senior project leaders, so we recruit to match a high level of expectation when it comes to code quality as well. You can learn more about what we do to ensure overall quality here.
In 2004 I owned two web-based businesses that I had founded back in Sweden. One was a web hosting business that had grown to 200+ clients spread across 10 dedicated servers.
The other was a gaming website with over 5000 daily visitors. I developed the software and websites required for my two businesses myself using the PHP programming language.
I developed the dynamic gaming website from scratch, as well as the CRM and sign up process for the web hosting business. I thereby gained valuable hands-on experience in programming that I later used to hire talented web developers for my new company.
Today PHP development service is still the core business of LiteBreeze, but we use it through modern frameworks like Laravel.
I was 19 when visiting Kochi and India for the first time back in 2004. After my first nine-month stint in India, I went back to Sweden in 2005 to get a business education.
I was still visiting India every now and then. In 2007 I returned to India to give my full-time attention to LiteBreeze.
Over the years I’ve filled various roles in the business. Early on I often took the role of PHP developer. As the company grew I moved on to project management.
Today I’m no longer involved in day-to-day project management though and all project communication goes through our talented Indian project leaders.
These days my time is invested in high-level quality assurance, retention of top talent, selective recruitment, coaching, marketing and building smart internal business processes and systems.
