Choosing Bukalapak as a Career Path After Australia

“When I was in Australia, there was this friend from Bukalapak that kept messaging me every 6 months to check what I was doing. One time during my stay in Indonesia, I decided to give him a message and meet up with him at his office — eventually, look where I am right now”

The thirty-something-old man went back to his hometown, Jakarta, after he finished his study at the University of Melbourne on a two-year program. Bukalapak has been actively looking for people like him — a part of the Indonesian diaspora — to come back and work in Indonesia as a part of Bukalapak #BukaJalanPulang program.

Andra, that’s how people call him, said he came back because he believes that Indonesia is having an enormous potential in big data — he is a data engineer — and being in Bukalapak gives him the opportunity and the room to tap into that potential and contribute to the data engineering field which is quite new during the time.

One of major things that makes him interested to go to Bukalapak is because he saw Bukalapak is a good place for someone to grow a career. The culture is quite similar with the working culture in Australia. Furthermore, Bukalapak really puts an importance for work-life balance. Thus, he has faith that coming back to Indonesia is the correct option and he can fully develop his long-term career here.


Andra’s Journey at Bukalapak

Andra first joined Bukalapak as a senior data engineer, working with the product squad that one of the responsibilities is to handle Bukalapak product recommendation. During that time, he set up a data processing infrastructure, transformed their data pipeline to use a more efficient in memory computing engine, and set up an automated system to manage all the data pipelines together. His work enable the feature to process larger amount of data in an efficient way — Thus, Bukalapak are able to create a more accurate product recommendation based on millions of users recommendation in just hours and it generated Billions of Rupiah in GMV for Bukalapak.

After showcasing that data engineering can help Bukalapak transform its data into GMV generating feature, he is given an added responsibility as a data architect and got tasked with architecting Bukalapak data warehouse to handle all Bukalapak data. Alongside this new task, he also got a pass to build his own data engineering team. “The data engineering team were once only have one or two people. Now we have more than 10.”, said the man with glasses. From a partly sum of 6 servers in the beginning, now the data engineering team is handling PB-scale data warehouse with thousands of data pipelines and helping to make Bukalapak data more accessible to everyone at the company. The big data infrastructure he and his team maintained has helped his co-workers to tap into Bukalapak various data source and use that to create various product features and generating insight for the company.

I’m happy to be an engineer, because what I made might be useful for others”, claimed the man who likes photography. “We hope in the future, all team is able to create their own infrastructure. So they can innovate by themselves.


What’s Next for Andra

Knowing the importance data and its processing infrastructure during his time as an academia, Andra is inviting college students to do some research at Bukalapak. “Here you can have a large scale computing platform at your hands to do analysis on huge amount of data” said the Bandung Institute of Technology graduate.

He also invites more people to join him and for diaspora to come back and do a lot of exciting and awesome things here at Bukalapak. “I hope more diaspora would like to come back here — there is many interesting and awesome things to do!” invites Andra.

Just last month, Andra was promoted to be Bukalapak’s Head of Cloud. Aside from his data engineering work, this man is working on improving Bukalapak infrastructure — working on ways to scale Bukalapak to handle the huge growth that it is currently experiencing right now. With so much on his plate, obviously, his team needs more people in the picture. “If words like containers, kubernetes, infrastructure-as-a-code, cloud, excites you, then give me a ping! Let’s work with Bukalapak to build Indonesia’s SME together.” said the man enthusiastically in the end of our session.


Want to dig deeper about the life of our engineers? come and visit us at https://bukl.pk/BukalapakEngineering

Stories and insights from the people inside Bukalapak

Bening Karilla Kinasih

Written by

Inside Bukalapak
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