Razvan Matei has had a lot of jobs in networking and cloud architecture — including Huawei, Nokia, Efecte, and F-Secure. He’s currently employed as a development leader at EasyMile, an autonomous vehicle company based in France. His lengthy resume isn’t a result of getting fired; instead, he said, it’s because he never let himself get comfortable in one place for long. Here’s why that’s key to a successful cloud architect career.

I help EasyMile extract maximum value from cloud technologies. There are two sides of the coin when it comes to cloud technologies. You can have a lot of stuff available at your fingertips. On the other hand, with so many technologies and so many possible combinations and courses, when a company has to make decisions, it's really complicated unless you know exactly what you're doing.

At the technical level, all these decisions are driven by business needs, obviously, but there is a fine balancing act in picking a technology that has a long-term benefit or picking something that helps you immediately but which might not be future-proof. And the balancing act is the fact that when you are in a young company you want to deliver as quickly as possible. 

So from the point of view of a cause architecture, the value that I bring to the company is that I know how to do this fine balancing act. I know what works and what doesn't.

How do you work with your colleagues to reach those decisions?

I have a team. Many of them are younger than me, some of them much younger than me. And when you’re working with that, you need to have the diplomacy in order to accept new ideas, but at the same time not to accept ideas that, while they may seem very cool, may turn out to be a bad decision in the long term.

At the end of the day, if you are an engineer that has seen or has been in a lot of situations —  not necessarily successes, because failures are as important as successes in this area — then you have a bit of confidence that your decisions are future-proof. 

And every day, every week, we have to choose or prepare a solution or think about how to solve a problem. And we have quite long debates about which path to take because nowadays, cloud technologies are like Legos. You have a bazillion variants and products, and it's actually a bit of a craft on how to combine them to extract the best value. In a nutshell, we spend most of the day, besides our hands-on work, thinking about what our choices will look like in three years, in five years. 

How did you get to this particular role?

I’ve worked in many different roles because I didn't let myself be driven by complacency.  

Sometimes what happens is that you join a company and you get comfy, and you reach your level of competence there. And you have absolutely no reason to leave; that level of comfort is actually attractive because things change so fast around you. But unless you have the acute feeling that you are progressing and learning stuff, it means that you are in a dead-end job.

So at that point, you have to make a decision. You say, okay, I'm going to look around, I'm gonna compare where the industry goes with what I'm doing right now. You give yourself some time, you try to change it. And then if you try to change your setting, and if you see that you don't have the same maneuvering space to align yourself with the current industry state, then you have to leave. 

You don't have to [leave] necessarily, and it's actually pretty hard to make the decision. But I will leave when I see my company stagnating from what interests me or what I see as the future.

So you think it's important to constantly challenge yourself with new job roles? 

Definitely. And people have different views. I had one interviewer ask me why I had so many jobs, and if I was fired so often. It’s ironic, in a sense, because the reason that I was in the interview with her was the fact that I’d had so many jobs. Not because of the jobs themselves, but because of the skills I acquired by changing. If I had stayed in one place, it was highly improbable that I would have had the skill set that made them offer me an interview in the first place.

When you’re a cloud architect in this sort of permanently evolving technology area, settling becomes dangerous. I've seen it happen with friends and colleagues — they work somewhere interesting, and then just settle and sit comfortably with something that they know. 

And then five or six years later, they searched for a job and could not find anything after their company folded or they had to move on.

So throughout your career, what skills have you used in every job role?

Curiosity and persistence. These are the two ingredients that you need to have to go forward. I guess it is valid for any field, but without curiosity in a field like this, you're going nowhere.

There is one person that actually has the perfect description for this mentality — Kobe Bryant. His mentality was that he did not have an innate talent for basketball. He said that if you have to, put in the work every day, like you will not succeed from the get-go; it will take months to even be able to be decent at some sort of move. So, in this area of cloud architecture, I would say it’s the same thing. You have to permanently challenge yourself, and changing jobs is basically part of that. 

In general, that’s not exactly the standard way of thinking. But for me, things changed early on in my career, when I worked for the first time at Nokia in Finland. When I started, I thought that everything was predictable. I thought that I had a plan — in three years I'll be an engineer, in five years I'll be chief engineer, and I planned it out for 15 years. And then this dot com bubble burst happened in 2000, and everything crashed for everybody. 

And while I witnessed the crash and burn of the industry, I changed my attitude about what it means to be job-secure. It didn't mean actually working in a company for 30 years — at least not in this domain. Confidence and security comes from knowledge and accumulating the skill set. 

What’s an average day like for you?

The average day for me has one constant. When you work with computers, you think you sit in front of the keyboard and two or three screens. And that is a constant. 

But for me, I think what is different is that I think a lot outside of the office, not near the screen. When I’m thinking about a problem or issue, I go outside with maybe just a pen and a paper, because being constantly tied to the chair just impedes good ideas sometimes. I take half an hour walks I just think alone about a certain problem. I reflect on it — I don't pick at the keyboard. I don't do any kind of prototype. I just think about the problem, and I try to find questions. 

What key piece of advice do you have for someone going into cloud architecture?

Don't get comfortable. Don't settle, don't get comfortable. It doesn't work like that. That’s just how the industry is.

This interview had been edited for brevity and clarity.