A Snapshot into Varo Platform Engineering
By: Chiranjeev Puri
Last year, I came across an interesting fintech startup called Varo. After going over their careers page, I saw a role opening to join the Platform and Security Engineering Team. While the job post itself mentioned keywords like “Kubernetes” and “Terraform,” the most unnerving was easily “Incident Response.” I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d be able to keep up with the workload but decided to apply anyway, thinking “What are the chances that my resume gets picked?”
Fast-forward to a couple of days later when I opened an email asking for my availability for a remote interview, explaining that the interview process would be broken up into two parts: the phone screen and the panel. Naturally, I scheduled both interviews immediately for the next available day.
The first interview was an extensive conversation about my resume and prior experience. I had previously worked with Kubernetes in another role, so I was familiar with a lot of the challenges that come with scaling a microservice platform. As I wrapped up my first interview, my interviewer asked me if I had any questions for him, upon which I quickly inquired about the incident response aspect of the job. He assured me that I would only be shadowing an on-call engineer during their rotation, rather than leading one on my own.
The second interview was a thorough series of panel interviews, meant to mimic the traditional on-site interview. The panel consisted of mostly senior engineers and managers, who I later learned would be my coworkers. Despite the strange nature of video interviews, my interviewers put my mind at ease, relating that they were also adjusting to the new remote setting. After completing the intensive back-to-back panels, I had one final panel with my interviewer from the phone screen. He relayed that he would take a look at the interview feedback from the other panels, and reach out in a couple of days.
And sure enough, a couple of days later, I joined my first remote job at Varo!
My crash course on the Varo Platform Team was a unique learning experience itself. I spent the first few days settling in and getting used to attending daily standup calls from my bedroom. The first thing I learned was how to install and use Varo-CLI, an internal command line tool. Over the coming days, one by one, I was introduced to other internal tools, like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and GitLab.
As I ventured from one workday to the next, I realized that working in a distributed team at Varo wasn’t as daunting as I’d feared. Documentation is a big part of Varo’s engineering culture, and one that really comes in clutch when you’re working remotely. To contribute to this, I also started to maintain detailed README files to any new code repositories as a way to ensure that any future developer could easily continue my work. I also learned that working remotely does have its own drawbacks. A big one is that interactions through text can quickly become detached. A great way to counteract this is to have 1:1s with each member of your team. In my experience, this allowed me to better understand the vibe of the team and what kind of challenges and goals I should try and set for myself.
In the following weeks, I began picking up small, 1-point tickets that chipped away at the sprint backlog. These tasks helped me get my feet wet in the myriad repositories that made up the Varo Platform. As my time at Varo went on, I started looking for larger and more impactful tickets. A couple of favorites involved refactoring Varo-CLI, using the aws-go SDK to optimize API calls, and investigating some interesting POCs as potential solutions to service ownership and self-service. Similarly, I began to shadow senior engineers during production incidents. Here, I got the opportunity to see firsthand that even during times of heightened tension, there is a sense of real camaraderie amongst the members of the Varo Engineering Team.
As I write this now, I realize that my experience at Varo was truly unlike any other. It’s not every company that will hire a college student to help contribute to their core infrastructure stack to help create a fully online bank. This truly was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I’m happy I got to spend it working alongside the Varo Platform Team.
