My first 4 months working with UPI tech team at Razorpay

🚀 The Onboarding:

From the first day that I got the offer, I was super excited for the opportunity. I had heard things about the company’s culture and its importance to tech, and it was well displayed during my onboarding process. I was a fresh graduate from NITK with lots of energy and enthusiasm. As a SDE, I like to follow new tech , play around with it and try to contribute whenever possible. We had a bootcamp a month long covering various topics and it was like a roller coaster of knowledge, It helped us to learn new things in such a short period of time and made me more curious about their use cases in the company. It included several KTs and tasks for us to complete. The Bootcamp was well designed and allowed me to learn lots of things in a short period. The mentors were approachable and I learnt a lot from them. We were given KTs for almost all the products in Razorpay which helped me to understand the company’s vision.

🏁 Joining the UPI team.

Even though I had several calls with my manager — it was only after the Bootcamp I was notified that I will be part of the UPI team in payments BU. UPI as we all know is the most favourable payment method by any Indian and working on that technology made me feel lucky. I was assigned a buddy to help me with the onboarding process. We had several KTs and demo sessions about UPI at Razorpay and the technology as a whole. Every KT made me research more and understand the flows in-depth and it was awesome.

It was so cool that during every UPI payment made by me, I would know where my money is and how the money flows. Soon after several KT sessions, I was finally able to understand the code flow and the UPI implementation at Razorpay and I thought I was ready to take up some tasks. But I missed the fact that UPI is evolving and improving itself and soon found out other interesting UPI payment flows as well — I started understanding other UPI flows and it made me admire the product more. Since UPI is a growing technology the team always has a new challenge on the plate and it never makes you feel bored at work. Along with all the good work, lucky to be teamed up with such enthusiastic teammates. I learned a lot from the team — tech-wise and work-wise as well. Everyone assisted me a lot to understand how to take up a feature or bug and proceed for the code implementation. The steps helped me to get to the solution to a problem and check it.

💻 The First Commit

Now I was quite confident about almost all the UPI flows and was experimenting with code. As per day to day routine while checking my calendar I could see that I was invited for a meeting. I was excited and nervous at the same time. It was not a big change but had a major impact on the success rate.I thought I would be a sidekick(since I was a newbie) and I would shadow someone making the change. I knew about the culture at Razorpay and the kind of ownership it gives to the devs and I experienced it on my first task itself.

One of my teammates explained to me on what to change and where to change and entire ownership was given to me afterwards. I was a little nervous at first because I was not so confident on how things work in post PR approvals and deploying the code. I took it up as a challenge and was able to deploy code with help of other team members. That feeling was great — a small code change impacting so many merchants and its businesses kind of gave a sense of responsibility to me and made me feel more proud of what I do.

⚓️ SDE for UPI

Soon after my first commit, I got more confidence in myself and soon I was able to debug the errors at ease. Once I got a little hold of things in UPI, I was assigned tasks as a primary owner and I always tried my best to complete them with all the expectations. Razorpay being a Tech first firm enabled me to get to know the technologies which are beyond the scope of a normal developer. For instance, the UPI team will soon start creating their own Micro-service which in itself is a good learning experience for me and the team and it will improve the product as well. At last, I am happy to be part of Razorpay and UPI and look forward to impacting the financial future of India.