Feb 2019 – Dec 2019 · 10 mos · Gurgaon, India

• Tower Research Capital is a big name in the tech world and specially in the HFT world. My excitement to be a part of that company was natural but unfortunately, my experience was sort of underwhelming due to a variety of reasons. Maybe it was just destiny and a sign of bigger and better things to come. ;)
• Sure, my time there was underwhelming, but I was still able to contribute in improving the quality of the trading platform by:
• Saving the toil to fix bugs in the automation framework every week by designing a new library for position calculation from scratch.
• Reducing the effort for release qualification from O(days) to O(hours) per stock exchange by automating the generation of test cases (Tower dealt with around 150+ stock exchanges).

Aug 2017 – Feb 2019 · 1 yr 6 mos · Gurgaon, India

• Having been acquired by Thales, the company was back in the safe zone and when an opportunity popped up to join back, I didn't have to think twice to get on-board. The best part was that I could blend the best of Sprinklr's learnings to Guavus and that is exactly what I did:
• Led the test infra team responsible for creation of generic automation frameworks which will reduce the code to be written by other users and setting the standards for automation across the organization.
• Created a generic Python framework based on Pytest and Fabric from scratch since every team was automating in silos and there was no reuse of code. Packaged the code as pip installable library to increase adoption.
• Created a generic config-driven framework for regression and validation of functional data which reduced the code to be written by user by as much as 80%. Even developers were able to use this framework for testing before releasing to the testing teams.
• Created a UI automation framework providing support for core UI components used across Guavus, so that no user has to write code for that again.
• Orchestrated the CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins with proper gating mechanism so that a commit/build gets rejected at the first point of failure. These eventually helped in catching bugs before the build was even delivered to the testing teams.
• Completed a training on Agile methodologies by Xebia organized by the company.

Apr 2014 – Nov 2016 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Gurgaon, India

• This big data hype was really living upto the expectations. I started to get a real tight grip on the backend systems. As a reason of which, I got much stronger in Linux with concepts like awk, expect, proc FS, kernel level settings, virtualization, OS installations just to name a few. I was even wondering how I could have done things better had I known all this earlier.
• With different projects came different big data technologies like Hadoop, YARN, Hive, Spark, Spark SQL, HBase (with Phoenix), Distributed Caching and only a fool would test a big data application manually. Hence, to automate stuff, I needed to have a new weapon in my arsenal and Python it was. What a language! Loved it (and still do with all my heart).
• Then came another important technical aspect, Performance Testing. After all what's the point of using big data technologies if they're not performing upto the mark? The key part here in testing the performance of the simulation of that large volume of data. Custom data simulators were written in Python to mock the production data and then the application was subject to that load. Performance activities are pointless without proper monitoring. To accomplish the same, NMON analyzer was used to find the root cause of the problems.
• And all this time, I was lucky enough to work with a guy named Amit Saxena (who happened to be my manager) who's the by far the best people manager I've come across till date. And needless to say, I galloped a lot of management fundas from him.
• All sounds fun until now, right? Well, it indeed was but for 1 thing; the future of the company itself which forced me to take the hard(est) decision of parting ways with the company precisely 3 years after I joined.

Nov 2013 – Mar 2014 · 4 mos · Gurgaon, India

• The first thing I learned here was that early promotion in a previous company doesn't really matter. But it was only fair as I would soon learn that, since this was a whole new world of possibilities. I almost felt like a fresher with my mind constantly questioning "What did I do until now?". But anyways, couldn't be any better for me. This was the reason I left Makemytrip in the first place and I got exactly what I wanted. Learning, learning and more learning.

Nov 2016 – Aug 2017 · 9 mos · Gurgaon, India

• Not sure what is it with me and job switches. Again I landed up in a place, where all the tech stack had negligible intersection with the one I was used to. Good for me anyways. Why? Simple. Learning, learning and more learning.
• I would actually brand Sprinklr as the turning point of my career. Thanks to my brilliant colleagues, I learned the art of framework development which opened up a world of new possibilities. We did some wonderful things there:
• Being one of 1st hires in the Gurgaon office's release qualification infra team, helped scale the team from scratch to 60 engineers.
• Promoted the culture of starting automation in parallel with development to minimize the cost of a bug.
• Performance testing which uncovered multiple scalability issues in the application.
• Created a dashboard to highlight the build compilation failures, production issues and defects.
• Though my journey was short and crisp, but I got to work with some really bright technical minds and it really helped me to hone my technical skills to a new level.

Jul 2011 – Nov 2013 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Gurgaon, India

• This is where it all began, my wonderful journey in the domestic flights (well not literally, it was my team). This is where I learned the manual and automation testing fundamentals. This is where I dug deeper into the web concepts. This is where I improvised my MySQL fundas. Most importantly, this is where I got comfortable using that (boring) Linux black and white terminal (which would later go on to be my best friend).
• Soon, I began to get the hang of it as my wonderful seniors would attest to. They put me in the driving seat of a project where in there was a complete architectural overhaul in the way the website was talking to post-sales system. I repaid their faith back by helping launch that multithreaded application which helped reduce the time to push the bookings to the post-sales system from O(days) to O(mins).
• Don't get the impression this was my only project. I don't even remember the count, but yes that was the project where I learned the most.
• Well, 2nd on the list of "Best Companies to Work for" and the leading online travel portal in India, I couldn't have asked for a better company to start for, but unfortunately things were all static eventually and I had to look out to seek more knowledge.
• P.S. Now that it strikes me, quite surprisingly I never really took any discount coupons for myself while I was there. Funny!