Hi Toronto, now it’s official.

We officially just launched in Canada, making Toronto the home of our first product development hub outside of Europe. And with it are big plans to engage the local talent pool and build new bridges to our other existing product development hubs worldwide. Our future is bright with potential and growth in this new market.

To get a glimpse of the bigger picture, we are excited to have Yaron Shaer, our current VP of Engineering and soon-to-be CTO of Klarna, share his vision on Klarna’s expansion to Canada.

Hi Yaron. Can you tell us a little bit why Toronto, Canada was chosen as the place to open the next product development hub?

Yes, Klarna has really rocketed when it comes to our products in North America. Therefore, having a product development hub in the region is of high importance. Klarna will benefit greatly from having talent mainly around the engineers and product management competence who are very close to the Canadian market – as it will help us enhance our success in the North American region. Also, Toronto is an international hub. The city attracts talent from all over the world, not only from Canada or even North America. We think we can grow quite rapidly with the great talent there.

What will be the focus of this product development hub and why? 

Toronto will have a variety of products that are powered by the domains present on-site, but we will start mainly by focusing on our consumer app. The consumer app domain has a very large appetite to grow and to enhance the experience we give to our customers.  That domain needs many engineers and Toronto, with its pool of engineering talent, is going to play a big part in answering this demand. 

As the incoming CTO of Klarna, what do you envision as the future network of our product developments and how they work together globally? 

That’s one of the main challenges that we are facing as we are becoming more and more globally distributed. How do we keep our strong internal culture tightly linked together between teams that are now split across countries and even timezones? The way to solve this is by designing our solutions very carefully, keeping in mind which teams work on each product and in which locations. 

But hiring the right people is of course also essential – building our sites up with people who are naturally collaborative, think big, and are curious about what’s happening globally at Klarna. 

Of course, we already provide all the tools that we need for remote working, meetings, and – when the restrictions allow us to again – traveling internationally between sites. The new reality is that work has become more distributed, remote working is something that is happening whether in hybrid form or fully remote. And as it is right now we are already experiencing success with this new way of working; We already have multiple product development hubs distributed across Europe, with Toronto being our first in North America. We can face any challenge with working globally – I think we have enough maturity in our product, in our culture, and in our operating model to make the most of this success. 

How do you see the development of the Toronto hub in the next few years? 

If we do our job right it will be developed very quickly to quite large numbers of mostly engineers on site. Klarna is growing at a pace at which we cannot sustain growth through our normal recruitment channels at our existing sites; therefore, we need to expand to new tech hubs. And we plan to grow our new Toronto hub very quickly to the size of our larger engineering hubs, like Berlin or even Stockholm from an engineering standpoint. After that let’s see what else we can do. I personally have very high hopes that this can be a very significant site for Klarna in a short period of time.

When do we start hiring in Toronto? 

We have already started hiring and are continuously on the lookout for more candidates who want to join in to shape and nurture the Klarna culture in Toronto. We are also bringing seniority from our other global hubs to Toronto so we can build culture and scale to the size we want to be.

So if you’re an engineer or a product person, and you want to join our Canadian momentum, have a look at our career page! The perfect position for you might just be already waiting for you in Toronto.

See all open positions: here.