Choosing Yugabyte. My Transition from Two-Time Intern to Full-Time Software Engineer

I am Srinivas Pothuraju, and I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an MS in Computer Science in December 2022.

My First Internship

My journey with Yugabyte started in October 2021 when I was looking for summer internship opportunities. The interview process was extremely smooth. My recruiter provided constant updates, and I thoroughly enjoyed my interviews with my manager, Juan. I was really interested in computer systems generally, and the kind of work being done by the YugabyteDB Managed team for our full-service database-as-service offering, captured my imagination. It was clear that Yugabyte was the ideal choice for my summer internship.

During my internship, I was very impressed by the people and the culture of the company. Trust, relationships and outcomes are the three Yugabyte core values, and they are not just words on paper. They’re put into practice every day.

Interns here are trusted to work on and deliver impactful projects, and we were mentored extremely well. The company also builds trust through total transparency. Every key decision made at the highest level (for example, one made at a board meeting), is transparently communicated in the bi-weekly, all-hands meetings.

My teammates are extremely smart, passionate, humble, and helpful, and it was easy to build long lasting relationships. Since Yugabyte is a remote-first workplace, I, along with my teammates, worked remotely during my internship. One of the biggest challenges as a new employee joining a company remotely is knowing where to find help. If you are stuck with the machine setup or other company-specific, technical issues that don’t have a solution you can find elsewhere, knowing here to find help can be a challenge. My mentor Catalin played an extremely crucial role here, ensuring that I was unblocked immediately wheneverI became stuck, so I didn’t lose momentum. In addition, most things are well documented, and there were several bootcamp videos available to watch and learn from.

My Second Internship

I really enjoyed interning for Yugabyte that summer. So much so, that I decided to intern there during my fall semester as well. During both internships, I was able to deliver highly impactful projects end-to-end. The Terraform Provider for YugabyteDB Managed was one and the Change Data Capture(CDC) on YugabyteDB Managed was another.

My mentor Catalin gave me enough freedom to express my thoughts during design discussions and supported me with great insights whenever I had questions. In addition to delivering two highly impactful projects, our team won the YugabyteDB Managed Annual Hackathon, where we built the command line interface (CLI) for YugabyteDB Managed.

Working with Yugabyte as a Full-Time Engineer

Because of the amazing work culture, passionate people, an incredible database product to work on, and the desire to pursue technical excellence in every task, I felt that continuing at Yugabyte as a full-time employee after graduation would be a great next step for my career.

Overall, joining Yugabyte has been a wonderful experience. So far, I have learnt a wide range of technical skills from my teammates, plus leadership skills from my mentor Catalin and my manager Juan. I’m  delighted with what I accomplished at Yugabyte.

Personally, I believe that there is a strong need to modernize the database layer in order to leverage the resilience and elasticity of the cloud. Distributed SQL databases like YugabyteDB are addressing that need for transactional workloads, and we are in the very beginning of this modernization journey.

Being an extremely difficult problem, it requires great expertise and incredible patience. I believe Yugabyte has the perfect leadership team in place to tackle technical problems and build a company with an amazing work culture as well as a robust market-leading database.

I was extremely happy to be offered a full time Software Engineer position at Yugabyte and was delighted to join the team full-time. There is still a long way to go and many interesting problems to be solved. I am extremely excited for what is to come.