Why Yugabyte is a Great Choice for Growing Your Engineering Career

Hello, my name is Akshat, and I joined Yugabyte on June 1, 2021. I’m a Software Engineer on the Yugabyte Cloud team. This is my first full-time job. In this blog post, I’d like to talk about my experience working here over the past six months and the amazing growth I’ve had since joining.

My experience at Yugabyte

I knew about Yugabyte before I joined the company. I was familiar with the product, the people, and the learning opportunity. I’ve summarized my reasons for joining Yugabyte in my previous blog post.

I’m ecstatic to say that my experience has far exceeded my original expectations in every aspect.

The work

Our cloud service—Yugabyte Cloud—was in beta stage when I first started at Yugabyte. We announced the general availability of Yugabyte Cloud in September. I had the opportunity to work on several critical and high-impact aspects of this product. It’s extremely satisfying witnessing the impact of my contributions.

Despite being a fresh graduate, I was given complete ownership and responsibility of extremely high-impact projects. The same has been the case for other fresh graduates as well. I’ve been able to take a project from the Proof of Concept (PoC) phase all the way through to production.

It’s still difficult to believe that most aspects of Yugabyte Cloud were in the design phase when I first started. We then put everything together in just a matter of months. It’s a testament to the kind of people we have, with everyone giving their absolute best and beyond. As a famous quote goes, “the strength of the team is each individual member, and the strength of each member is the team.”

There’s a constant influx of challenging work. There’s not a single day when you don’t learn something new.

Incredible learning opportunity

It’s been an exponential learning curve for me so far. There’s always scope to learn new things. The past six months have helped me grow both my technical and non-technical skill sets.

In the process of taking a feature from design phase to production, I learned what goes into designing a complete feature end-to-end. I discovered the intricacies we need to be careful about, as well as the trade-offs we (sometimes) need to make.

Exhaustive reviews and feedback on design documents and pull requests have helped me master best practices. And there’s always room for healthy discussions on why something was done. The opportunity to have these discussions with highly-experienced colleagues and understand their perspectives has been rewarding.

There’s utmost importance given to unit testing any functionality. I’ve realized how crucial unit testing and code coverage is to ensure a robust application. I’ve also learned the importance of being flexible. Requirements and code are bound to be ever-changing in a fast-paced environment.

Apart from all the above mentioned technical aspects, I’ve also grown my non-technical skills. I’ve had the chance to present my projects multiple times in front of the Cloud team, the entire India team, as well as in company-wide All Hands meetings.

I’ve been involved with the hiring drives as well. This has been another wonderful dimension of my overall experience working here. It’s remarkable how much better I have become communicating with people in the past few months.

People and culture

The kind of energy, enthusiasm, and passion people possess at Yugabyte is contagious. Everyone has a very strong sense of leadership. It’s a wonderful experience being in an environment that constantly motivates you to become a better version of yourself.

My colleagues are extremely approachable, helpful, and motivated in contributing to the company’s mission. Despite having a packed schedule, everyone goes above and beyond to guide me with my never-ending supply of trivial questions.

There are tons of exciting projects in development or in the pipeline. And there’s complete freedom to choose what interests you. I’ve done it myself multiple times. All it took was a quick conversation with my manager conveying the reasons behind my interest in a particular project.

I’ve worked on multiple projects so far with multiple teams and with different sets of people. As someone rightly said, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I’ve learned something from each and every person I’ve talked with at Yugabyte. Everyone’s exceptionally amazing at what they do. We are also paired with a random colleague every two weeks to encourage interaction in a geographically-distributed, remote environment. I’ve had some absolutely amazing conversations thanks to this program!

One final element of Yugabyte’s culture I’m proud of is the organization’s transparency. We are kept in the loop with where the company is headed, where we are with our revenue targets, and more. The sense of belonging and community is unparalleled.

Summary

I couldn’t have asked for a better experience to kickstart my full-time career as an engineer. I’m also very grateful for the colleagues I get to work with on a daily basis.

Thanks to the entire Yugabyte team for giving me the opportunity to make a difference and helping me grow constantly. I am looking forward to a wonderful journey ahead.

Thank you for reading! 🙂

Want to join a dynamic company in growth mode? We are currently hiring for a number of open positions across Yugabyte. Discover your next opportunity today!