Why I Joined Yugabyte as a Software Engineer for YugabyteDB Managed

Hi, my name is Akshat and I joined Yugabyte on June 1, 2021, as a Software Engineer in the Yugabyte Cloud team.

My background

I completed my undergraduate in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India. As I am a 2021 graduate, this is my first full-time job.

Throughout my Bachelor’s, I have completed multiple software engineering internships. I was a Google Summer of Code 2018 student in my freshman year, a software engineering intern at Grofers in my sophomore year, a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs in my junior year, and a software engineering intern at Economize in my senior year.

Apart from the internship experiences in the industry, I have explored a diverse range of domains throughout my undergraduate journey. Due to that, I was able to figure out that my interests lie in databases, distributed systems, and cloud.

How I knew about Yugabyte

When I became very interested in databases, I began diving into the intricate details. Naturally, I also kept myself updated with the latest happenings in the industry in this domain. I knew distributed databases would be a hot topic in the coming decade, and Yugabyte caught my attention. I started exploring more about it, and came across a talk by Karthik Ranganathan (CTO and co-founder of Yugabyte) in the Distributed SQL Summit where he discussed the design and architecture of YugabyteDB. I was fascinated by how elegantly everything was put together in order to develop a high-performance distributed SQL database.

Reasons for joining Yugabyte

Yugabyte’s product is really good

Well, the product itself has to be appealing enough, right? A shift to distributed databases is certainly the future and Yugabyte has established itself as one of the leading companies in this area. I love some of the design decisions taken by the team which make YugabyteDB a standout amongst the competitors. Leveraging the popularity and power of PostgreSQL compatible SQL and ACID transactions is certainly one of the many distinguishing features.

I see immense potential in the product and am excited to be a team member and contributor. Several large companies have already chosen YugabyteDB over other competitors to handle their data and transactions.

Incredible learning opportunity

I have joined the YugabyteDB Managed (formerly Yugabyte Cloud) team, which is essentially YugabyteDB Database-as-a-Service. At the time, YugabyteDB Managed was still in Beta at the moment, which means I also get the opportunity to work on the product from an early stage. I got the chance to explore and work on cloud-related features in my internship at Economize which I enjoyed, and so the role at Yugabyte aligned remarkably well with my interests.

Through the internships done in my bachelor’s degree, I have fine tuned my preferences by exploring work in vastly diverse environments, in different domains, and on different products. I can confidently say that Yugabyte is an ideal fit for me, based on the various experiences I have had so far. The kind of education, amount of ownership, mentorship and growth that comes from being surrounded by exceptionally talented people, the impact my work would have in the product’s journey are all of the things that I look for in a role. I am confident that being at Yugabyte will ensure that I get all of these advantages and more!

Quality of people

The co-founders have been an integral part of building Cassandra and HBase at Facebook, and also have years of experience working on databases at Oracle. Our CEO, Bill Cook, is also an extraordinary leader with an exemplary record of building and scaling enterprise infrastructure companies, and it has been enriching to hear his thoughts and vision in our weekly meetings. There are also exceedingly talented and smart engineers working on the product, and in my time so far here, I have always learned something new from each interaction with anyone on the team.

Amazing interview experience

I have always thought of interviews as a medium of two-way evaluation. Not only are the interviewers supposed to assess whether you’re the right fit for the role or not, but you should also be evaluating whether the company and the role is right for you.

With that being said, I had a particularly smooth and enjoyable interview process. I had a standard coding test, followed by a couple of back-to-back interviews. Along with some questions to evaluate my problem solving skills, we also had a good discussion on the product, the role, my interests, and where the product is headed. It was definitely one of the best interview experiences that I have had.

I remember one of the interviewers saying that they’re not only looking for problem solvers, but also for people who have the aptitude to learn, grow, and explore diverse areas. This definitely resonated with me and I knew this is going to be a wonderful journey if I end up getting the offer, which I did.

Open source and community involvement

I have always loved the open source community. The spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing in open source is humbling. YugabyteDB is completely open source under the Apache 2.0 license. It is very exciting to see the huge community involvement on our GitHub repositories as well as on our Slack workspace.

The commitment to open source by Yugabyte is commendable, as it keeps the product transparent and accessible to the public. Also, the amount of excitement and involvement the community has shown towards our product is yet another measure of how good our product is.

Joining Yugabyte

It has been exceptionally exciting throughout my journey at Yugabyte so far. The more I explore our products, the more I am fascinated by what the team has achieved. I feel grateful to have been given the opportunity to be a part of the wonderful Yugabyte family and join the team on their mission.

It has been a tremendous learning experience. Everyone that I have interacted with has been extremely kind, supportive and approachable, as well as highly motivated in contributing to the company’s mission.

Thanks to the team for giving me the opportunity to make a difference. I could not have asked for a better start to my career than being here at Yugabyte, and I am looking forward to a wonderful journey ahead.

Thank you for reading! 🙂