Unlocking my journey @ Hiver

Introduction and Interview Process:

Hey there! This is Rahul Mallik, currently working as an SDE-2 Backend at Hiver in the Sync Engine Engineering team. It’s been almost 5 months since I entered this amazing tech world . It feels great and exciting to look back and give a glimpse of my experience so far!

To start with, I would like to talk about my interview process at Hiver. It was one of the quickest and most efficient interview processes I have ever witnessed! The interviewers were super senior folks with whom I had enjoyable discussions. And Voila! The final call regarding the offer from TA arrived, and I was (and I am always) super excited to work in an organization with a remote-first culture that promotes the ability to work from anywhere in the world!

Onboarding and Initial Tasks:

I joined the Admirals Tech team which is responsible for the Email Channel and works on customer-facing features in both front-end and back-end within the Gmail context, Admin Panel, and also the Grexit Admin Panel (for customer configs and settings). I was truly amazed by the fact that I was given one month of onboarding and ramp-up time to familiarize myself with the product and the super cool, approachable team. Even though Hiver is a startup, I got to know that the company believes in the growth mindset and structured onboarding to acquire product expertise before development.

Gradually, my manager started assigning tasks for me to get my hands dirty with the system. Some involved fixing bugs related to customer onboarding and Gmail APIs, bugs in one of the critical repos, one related to documentation of endpoints in the well-known repo as part of the Tech Spec. Also, I got to work on a new SDLC — a standardized way to handle builds and deployments, decentralization of configs, which provided great exposure to the Infra side of things and also cutting-edge tools in the CI/CD space like ArgoCD, Github Actions. I was one of the first engineers in the company to pick up the project and worked with the DevOps and other junior developers to roll out the new SDLC for some key microservices

Team Building and Staycation:

Now that I’ve covered the initial stages of my journey at Hiver, let’s dive into the fun part!,it’s time to discuss the fun part! — our team’s adventurous Staycation in Uttarakhand! As soon as I joined Hiver, I was super excited to know that the team is planning for a Staycation @ Uttarakhand. We visited Delhi, Hardiwar, Rishikesh, and Mussoorie, which gave me a great opportunity to connect with my team on a personal level while enjoying the serenity! And that was my first-ever Staycation with colleagues in my life, which is so special and memorable.

Transition to Sync Engine Team:

As soon as I returned from the Staycation, I was given the news that I will be moving to the sync-engine, which is responsible for syncing emails/ label changes to users in a Shared Mailbox.While I started to feel that I would miss my wonderful team, I was also excited to get to know the new team and take on new challenges. The leadership team ensured the transition was super-smooth.

Technical Challenges and Recognition:

I started my journey with sync-engine with onboarding videos and sessions about the system, components, and their complexities. Soon after, I was roped in by the Principal Engineer to understand the existing system of Observability and propose a scalable and maintainable solution. I came up with the SOTU (State of the Union Document which documents the existing system and its pain points) to describe the problems like usage of a lot of queues, dependency on MySQL, and a complicated Low Level Design. As soon as I published it, I got instant recognition from my peers and also got mentioned in the monthly Aspirations meet. Thanks to the Culture of Recognition @ Hiver, this further motivates engineers like me to go above and beyond at work . As a result, I worked on the Tech Spec that included the new High Level Design with redis as shared storage for metric info instead of DB, and Kafka to streamline and publish the redis update and metric events and publish the metrics by integrating with ElasticSearch for customer-centric metrics and Datadog for cockpit view metrics.

High-Impact Projects and Learning Experiences:

I was also put into the design brainstorming sessions of BreakingBad, one of the most ambitious projects at Hiver, aimed at decoupling shared business logic into independent services for better scalability and developer productivity as a long-term business objective. It was fun debating with system experts on design choices. I also managed to come up with payload contracts and class design for one of the services.

My new manager at sync-engine decided to put me into high-impact projects aimed at achieving short-term business goals. As a result, I got to work on projects, which had a lot of challenges and direct customer impact in terms of scale. I did extensive analysis on the pain points and proposed a few optimizations to reduce the impact on MongoDB/MySQL and overall runtime. Also, I was involved in the improvements for speeding up a core business flow in sync-engine.

As part of business continuity, I also got to experience the on-call process @ Hiver for the first time. Right from debugging critical issues late in the night to performing detailed RCAs and creating action items, it was a great learning experience in terms of understanding the system and its problems.

Thinking smart and out of the box:

With respect to one of the projects mentioned above, there was a scenario where there were a lot of Gmail API calls(Hiver depends on Gmail) being made for one of our top customers. Ideally, the no. of calls should have come down the next day but it did not. My manager nudged me further to think out of the box and investigate the root cause.This helped me discover hidden data patterns and approach the problem better.

Personal Growth and Recognition:

During our regular town hall meeting, HR typically announces the Circle of Excellence winners. My manager was kind and supportive enough to nominate me for the ‘New Bee Award’ based on the work and impact created by me during my initial months @ Hiver. Again, something to push me further!

Conclusion:

On the whole, what I am experiencing is a structured/efficient work environment combined with a great culture of recognition and ample support from peers and leadership. With this I bid farewell until my next blog post. Goodbye for now!