Inside Milrem Robotics with Nanda van der Stap: what's it like working for an Estonian company from the Netherlands?

Since the beginning of October, I work as Product Manager Autonomy and Intelligent Functions for Milrem Robotics. It’s a really fun and challenging job, partly because this is a relatively new position in the company. Together with my colleague Andrei, we’re basically trailblazing full-time. This trailblazing aspect was what attracted me most about this job, and together with the prospective fantastic Dutch team I’d have, it made me decide to switch jobs. ?

When I told people I planned on working for Milrem Robotics, the most-received reply was: ‘Why are you choosing a travel time of 1,5 hours to Best over the 15-minute bike ride you have now?’- they were referring to the location of the Dutch office. My reply was: ‘Actually, the headquarters of the company is in Tallinn, Estonia’ – which led to even more confused faces. ?

I dare to say that people in the Netherlands don’t know that much about Estonia and its inhabitants. To be completely honest, since I’ve started working for Milrem I myself have learned that Estonians have the same power plugs and currency as we do (the first thing I googled when I travelled there), eat hot meals for lunch, can be quite pessimistic about their own weather, have the most beautiful forests in the country but most of all are very hospitable, kind people with a sense of humour. ?

However, I think what confused people most was not my prospective travel time, but the fact that it is quite an unknown fact that Estonia is a pioneering robotics country. To all the Dutchies reading this, here are some fun facts about that, too:

1) Did you know that the Estonian Starship robotics company is making live robotic food deliveries already? And, given loads of snow that Estonia knows, I think this is even more impressive.

2) More than half of schools and a number of kindergartens in Estonia teach children programming and robotics through play. That’s something I can only dream about for my Dutch daughter.

3) Did you know that Milrem Robotics had its first working offroad robot developed 8 years ago? ?

From this list, I can only conclude that it makes perfect sense to want to work for a robotics company in a ‘far away’ country like Estonia. And if you’re wondering how it is to remotely work on robotics in another country, I’d say: ‘Since the corona pandemic, who isn’t used to working from home? Seriously: we all have fast internet so video meetings are no problem, everybody speaks English very well and the Milrem policy is that all meetings and documents should be in English anyway, so I don’t feel like an outsider. In other words: for me, working in Estonia or working in a Dutch company feels quite the same post-corona.