jalotra

why join a startup ?

ShivamJalotra's photo
ShivamJalotra
·

3 min read

what is a startup anyways ?

to me : it is a group of people (who bring in empathy and skills) to build something new, change the status quo, improve QOS (quality of service), look at problem from a different angle, take help of the newest tech to solve important pieces of puzzle.

Detour, who am I ?

  • just to work at flipkart Ads stack on serving side, a big company with 1000+devs and a whole lot of people and processes in place.

  • joined a B2B startup out of HSR in April, 2024, now I have been in the system for about 6 months.

Journey

April 2024 - Joined a CoWorking space, with just 10 employees out of bangalore office, I was Employee Number : 11

Worked on some important pieces around Templating Engine

Me figuring out the logging stack

July 2024, (we pivoted) had our product sessions here (2 times)

injoyed with team

(Sept 2024) Moved to a new office (just have a floor for now)

(November 2024) went to goa for offsite

Things that I contributed on ?

  • helped in setting up our Templating Engine, the backend and data model is what we use to solve a unique USP of the product

  • helped in setting up our backend (java) service, defined the abstractions in terms of how to write services, have entities Crud spec abstracted out, now writing a new entity to our primary datastore is a straight forward thing.

  • helped in setting up our ML pipelines for a optimisation problem that an intern solved for us, this includes doing compute NFRs (finding optimal system spec : cpu, mem to choose); how to do distributed computing (we use dask for compute)

  • helped in setting up our dev, qa and prod environments; our devops stack is wholely on AWS : codepipelines, codebuilds and ecs (as compute)

  • helped in setting up our identity system (we use Descope right now, the AuthN and AuthZ is abstracted out so we can eventually move all the SSO and identity logic)

  • helped in setting our ingestion pipelines, to get data from a 3P into our systems (bulk ingestion, forward incremental sync and reverse mini-batch sync)

  • did a lot of pocs and tech talks around RAGs, agents, features above.

Takeaways

if you are a curious guy / gal and highly ambitious and want to create value in this world, startups should be your place to be in.

the risk is low from processes and systems POV, so you have a lot of leverage to try new things, solve things differently and enjoy the process

you become an all-rounded person : you understand the tech (because that’s what you get paid to do), you understand the product (you work very closely with product to figure out the details); you understand the business (product and business are very close in my case, since its SaaS)

Startups