Affinidi

Magnus Ahmad (29 years), Senior Product Manager

What exactly does your job involve?

Hi. I’m Magnus. I’m 29 years old, and I’m a Senior Product Manager at Affinidi. Our mission is to empower users with control over their data. And to do that, we have a range of developer tools, which makes it easy for developers to build privacy-preserving applications and give their customers greater control over their data. 

My job is to understand our customers and translate that into requirements for our Engineering and Business teams. On a day-to-day basis, that has me working very closely with our engineers for the execution side. At the same time, I work cross-functionally with a lot of other teams at the company, from Marketing to Legal and Finance, to ensure that we’re all working collaboratively for the success of the product. 

What fascinates you about this job?

I’ve always been interested in privacy and the right to anonymity online. And what I really love about Affinidi is we make that a really core part of our mission. Everybody here is here because they’re driven by that mission, to really shift the control of data back into the hands of the user. 

So, you know, a lot of us can relate to the experience of being online today being basically very transactional with big companies that are doing things with your data that you might not like.

And at Affinidi, we are really trying to reverse that relationship so that the power is in your hands and our hands as individuals, and we get to dictate the terms of how we interact with companies online. Being a part of that fascinates me.

Why did you choose this at Affinidi job in Berlin?

I come from a multinational background. My mother is English, my father is German and Bangladeshi. I grew up in multiple different countries in my childhood both in Europe and Asia. So I’ve never felt like I would spend the rest of my life in one place.

Before this, I was living in London for five years, and it felt like it was time for a change. And I wanted to explore the German side of my heritage a little bit more, so Berlin was an easy choice, having visited the city a few times before and liked it. And not only that, but it has a good tech scene, which is my area. So I knew I wanted to move to Berlin with my partner. The next thing was finding the right job. I found Affinidi because of my personal interests, like I mentioned, in privacy and anonymity. It felt like a good match. 

What really made me confident was when I was talking to people at the company – and I had conversations with many people who work here before I joined – and felt the connection of that mission from everybody I talked to. But also, just that they were good people, and I wanted to work with them.