How to Hire a Scala Developer: Expert Guide from IT Recruitment Specialists

Hiring a Scala developer requires special recruitment skills. You must thoroughly examine the technical experience and be able to entice specialists with your offer using the best headhunting practices. In this case, over-filtering candidates is not an option, as the talent pool is particularly limited.

Keep reading to find out what needs to be taken into account during the selection process, what questions to ask candidates during the screening interviews, and how an IT recruitment agency can make hiring fast and effective.

Candidate’s portrait: Who is a Scala developer?

Scala developers are scarce on the IT market. This object-oriented JVM language was primarily created for fast and effective development in the big data field. However, due to their complete compatibility, it can be found alongside Java in the stack of a wide range of applications. It is less commonly used with the Play Framework in web projects, such as high-load websites, social networks, or educational platforms.

For these reasons, when hiring a Scala developer, you’ll be competing with both large IT corporations and promising startups. It is critical to outperform your competitors in the employer market, beginning with perks and continuing with the quality of the hiring process.

Mykola Kliestov

CTO and co-founder at ITExpert

“Hiring a Scala developer presents a difficult recruitment challenge. These positions are hard to fill due to the acute shortage of candidates and high demand.

What is especially difficult is finding and attracting a big data specialist who works with Scala. The formula for a stellar candidate includes Hadoop, Spark, and Scala. This indicates a higher degree of technical expertise, and companies actively seek out IT specialists with these skills.”

Scala developer’s skillset

A typical vacancy for a middle+ backend Scala developer looks like this:

• Deep knowledge of programming language Scala and its ecosystem (IO, Play Framework, Sangria, and other tools, depending on the project needs);
• Understanding the principles of JVM, JDK/JRE, and related technologies;
• Knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases;
• Experience working with message queues (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or ActiveMQ);
• Use of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure);
• English: conversational or at a level sufficient for reading documentation.

Skillset for big data positions:

• Proficiency with the Hadoop stack (Spark, YARN, Hive, MapReduce, HDFS, etc.);
• Proficiency with Akka and other big data frameworks, depending on the needs of your project;
• Use of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure), depending on the needs of your project;
• Skills in using databases to work with big data.
• English: conversational or at a level sufficient for reading documentation.

Additionally, employers pay attention to the candidate’s soft skills. Independence, ability to take responsibility, openness to feedback, and communication skills are especially valued.

Important! It is not possible to check all the points from a candidate’s profile using only a resume or an HR screening—conducting a professional interview (technical and/or managerial) is critically important. Fortunately, we have already shared useful questions for interviewing programmers on our blog — feel free to read them.

Where can I find a professional Scala programmer?

Do you want to get more applications from Scala developers? Here, you’ll find detailed information about useful platforms and search queries for such positions, as well as a bonus: a job template.  

#1 LinkedIn

This professional social network is suitable not only for networking and building a personal brand, but also for finding candidates. You can post vacancies in publications for your contacts, through the Job Slots function, or by sending emails to suitable candidates.

Tip: To grab the interest of skilled specialists from the very first message, use short texts. Follow the principle of “minimum characters, maximum value”—your employer value proposition is more important than a long list of responsibilities. Don’t forget to talk about the goals of the position and the achievements of your project: attracted investments, the number of product users, or awards received.

You can find suitable profiles using a Boolean search. Here are some example search queries for Scala positions with different stacks:

• Scala AND Play AND React
• Scala AND (Redis OR Riak OR MongoDB OR Elasticsearch OR Solr)
• (“Data engineer” OR “extract transform and load” OR ETL OR “data pipelines” OR “data ingestion” OR “data processing”) AND Scala
• Scala AND Spark AND Hadoop
• Scala AND Spark AND (Hadoop OR YARN OR Spark OR Hive OR MapReduce OR HDFS)
• Scala AND (Kafka OR SQS OR RabbitMQ OR ActiveMQ)
• Scala AND Akka AND (PostgreSQL OR Elasticsearch OR Clickhouse OR MariaDB OR Actor OR Cluster OR Persistence OR Streams OR ZIO OR Cats OR Magnolify)

#2 IT Job search sites

Platforms for Scala developer jobs: what are these resources? Developers actively seeking jobs monitor online job boards such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Dou, or Djinni. You can post your job opening on these sites so that specialists can easily submit their CVs if they are interested in your offer.

You can quickly create a description with our Scala job template.

#3 IT recruitment agencies

Sometimes, the skills and time resources of an in-house recruitment team are not enough: the candidate database and tools are limited, and advanced resources are expensive. Recruitment agencies can enhance your search, giving it a second wind. External professionals always have a hot candidate database and access to niche resources, allowing them to quickly provide you with the first relevant resumes.

Moreover, these specialists can offer you additional consultation and provide valuable insights about the talent market. This ensures that every job opening you have will be filled by an ideal candidate!

Questions for screening interviews with Scala developers

What is the best way to filter candidates at the initial stages of recruitment in order to conduct technical interviews only with the most experienced Scala developers? You should write succinct but precise screening questions for the recruiter.

The following screening questions will be useful: 

For web development:

• How much experience do you have using Scala? How many years of commercial application? And how many of those using Play Framework?
• Have you had experience with NoSQL databases? If so, which ones specifically?
• Do you cover your code with unit tests? What framework do you use for that?
• Do you have any experience with message queues? If so, which message brokers have you used?
• Have you used cloud technologies in previous projects? If so, which ones?

For big data:

• How many years of experience do you have using Scala, and how many of those relate to distributed computing, specifically using Akka?
• Are you proficient with technologies from the Hadoop stack? Which ones specifically, and for how long have you used them?
• What is your experience with ETL and data processing? Have you worked with specialized OLAP databases?
• Have you worked with modern data lake and data streaming solutions? Have you had any experience with Kafka streams, Google pub/sub, or similar technologies?
• Have you used cloud technologies in your previous project, in particular specialized cloud data solutions?

These are example questions for screening interviews with Scala developers that you can use when starting to analyze a job opening. However, your hiring manager is the best source of information. Check the details with them and coordinate the screening questions for an effective recruiting outcome.

Find an experienced Scala developer with ITExpert

Are you looking for Scala developers for your project?  It’s a challenging task, but we can help! Since 2015, the specialists of the IT recruitment agency ITExpert have been hiring IT specialists for companies in Ukraine and worldwide—from the USA to Israel. Among our clients are Sony, Deloitte, and Depositphotos.

See more details

Follow the link for more cases from the ITExpert team.

We simplify IT recruitment and take on the recruitment of candidates, selection, and technical pre-screening so that you can receive resumes of strong specialists who possess all the necessary skills. You’re just a few clicks away from new skilled candidates—tell us about your vacancies, and we’ll get in touch with you shortly!