Centric to recruit 200 IT specialists in Lithuania for new office in Kaunas

Benelux IT services firm Centric is this year opening a new international office in Kaunas, after Vilnius the second largest city in Lithuania. The Benelux-headquartered company expects to employ 200 specialists over the next three years, with a focus on young and talented technology professionals. 

In 2011, Centric expanded for the first time into Central Eastern Europe and the Baltics. The organisation in Romania, based in Iasi, has since then grown into a team of nearly 300 professionals. In total, across its footprint Centric has more than 4,000 employees on its payroll. The Romanian colleagues work together with the distributed agile teams in the Benelux on software solutions for customers in Western Europe.

To meet the growing demand for digital transformation and managed services, Centric last year decided to explore opportunities for opening a second location in the region. “When we started looking for a new location for the expansion of our teams, we discovered Lithuania,” said Freddie Veltmaat, Chief Technology Officer at Centric. The firm’s selection committee ultimately picked Kaunas, a university city. “Kaunas is an attractive city: many young people live and study there and the city has a good university, the Kaunas University of Technology. We were impressed by the IT knowledge and IT talent in the city. Moreover, the government and universities support our arrival, which allows us to make a flying start.” 

The new colleagues in Lithuania will focus on technical engineering, managed services and cloud engineering. They will adopt Centric’s uniform ways of working and will be an integral part of the firm’s teams in Western Europe. 

In order to be able to fulfill the ambitious target of 200 new IT recruits, Centric will work together with the university similar as to it does in Romania to train and supervise graduates and students. “We are convinced that in Kaunas we can attract the specialists with the right technical background and proactive attitude that is important for successfully supporting customers,” remarked Veltmaat. 

In addition to offices in the Netherlands (where the firm is headquartered in Gouda), Romania and soon Lithuania, Centric also has hubs in Belgium (Oostkamp), Germany (Ratingen), Norway (Oslo), Romania (Iasi) and Sweden (Sundbyberg).

Meanwhile in the Baltics, Aon Baltic recently acquired regional player Balto Link, growing its headcount in the region to 300 professionals.