[Meet the Team] Andrea Cornaglia #Thisisme

For Andrea Cornaglia, languages come quickly and easily; she has been learning them her whole life: Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and now French. It’s been just over a year since she moved to Paris and joined Nuxeo as a Front-End Software Engineer, and she is still mastering the language. The pandemic has made it more challenging than her other international moves, as there are fewer opportunities for socialization, so she sticks to French books, podcasts, movies, and video lessons with a private tutor.

In late high school, her entire family moved from Argentina to Brazil, where she earned a degree in economics and met her husband, Bruno. When he was offered an opportunity in Silicon Valley, they took it, and Andrea completed a Masters in web design and adopted two California cats. Having learned to navigate the challenges of making friends, going to the store, and visiting the doctor in a new country, they decided to move to Paris after visiting Europe as tourists on several occasions. “It was the adventure– of course we didn’t imagine there would be a pandemic.”

As hard as the year has been, she’s grateful that the move brought her to Nuxeo. Andrea’s previous company did not have an office in France, so she started looking for tech companies with a presence in Paris and quickly found Nuxeo. Initially, she was interested in Nuxeo for its international structure, but as she started to research more, the culture stood out.

I started looking at Glassdoor to see what employees were saying, and it struck me that people were very happy to work here.

Nuxeo engineering is structured around semi-autonomous functional teams, and Andrea’s engineering, product manager, designer, and occasional QA or DevOps colleagues are mostly distributed. The Nuxeo Paris office is home to people she doesn’t work with every day, but they have welcomed her and helped make the transition a little easier. “Usually lunch time is more sociable. We’ll go out and grab food and sit together to chat. That’s a time where we get to socialize the most and I get to practice my French.” Someday, she might like to move somewhere new, but in many ways, she feels like she’s still getting started at Nuxeo and in France.

First thing on Andrea’s post-pandemic list? Lisbon, where she can meet more of her team in person.