Celebrating 5 years at redBus

“Like any other engineers, I also dreamt of working in a company which makes products that are used by millions of customers and makes some impact in their day to day life”.

No idea where to start with, As I still have a feeling that I just joined redBus, but now it is almost 5 years over. The moment when I say ~5 years, definitely this question will be, how is it even possible!!! Yeah, I know typical developer mindset :D

But you know what sometimes miracles might happen. The reason that I am with redBus is because of its work culture and great minded people. This quality makes redBus special to me.

If you believe in “life is a book”, many pages of my life are covered by redBus. In this journal, am delighted to share a few pages of it with you people!!!

Now rewinding you all to 2015. Ya, that’s the year I joined redBus. That year was very special to me both personally and professionally. Personally is because got married :D and professionally as I returned from the United States as a US bridegroom ;))

Previously, I was working in a Startup located in Whitefield. Fortunately or unfortunately my startup didn’t go well that was impacting me financially. So I planned to move out of my startup.

By the way, I forgot to mention, like the bride search I had few criteria to be matched with for the company to join.

*The company should be located within 5 km radius of my stay as I was really really frustrated with the Bangalore traffic and signals.

*To be part of customer impactful products and see how people’s life becomes easy using the product.

So I started looking for companies that match the criteria.

One fine day, on my way to my office I saw the redBus logo opposite the Manipal Hospital. And so I immediately checked (https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Reviews/redBus-India-Reviews-E457169.htm) for reviews. And obviously checked whether the office was close to my location. It’s my fortune that it matched both the criteria and I applied for the job on LinkedIn.

My profile matched their requirement. So I was called for the interview. Now will brief you about the recruitment process I went through:

Trust me, the recruitment team was so friendly here, they contacted me over the phone. They explained elaborately about my roles and responsibilities and then took me through the interview process as well. redBus interview process is almost the same as any other product companies.

1. Online interview process. For me, it was on hacker rank. Only a few teams in redBus follow this process, otherwise, it is a simple screening or exploratory telephonic call.
2. Once the online interview process is cleared, then it is an onsite interview at redBus office. I received a call in a week’s time from the recruiter and called for the interview.

The onsite interview typically consists of the following 4 rounds.

1. Coding round — this covers mainly DS(array, LinkedList and tree) & algorithm skills. Can go through https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/. which mostly covers the medium problems and few hard problems too. Based on the team, one/two Interviewer(s) might be part of the panel. My panel had 2 interviewers and was related to coding.
2. Design round — Questions might vary based on the roles and team. Can still go through design pattern & system design skills. Mine was a senior role so had system design-related problems.
3. Hiring Manager round — Again question depends on the team and roles. For me, it was mostly with behavioural stuff.
4. Director/CTO round — Again based on the role. For me, the interview was with the Director with a few technical and behavioural stuff.
5. HR round

Here ends the interview process.

And I definitely say that one good quality that impressed me more in redBus is whether the interview is positive or negative. They share the feedback after the interview as we cannot expect this from most of the companies. For me guess the feedback what it could have been!!! Of course, positive(working here right!!!) which was shared immediately.

I got an official offer letter from redBus within a week’s time and then I joined redBus. When I joined redBus, trust me I don’t know “ABC” about web technologies, as mostly I was working on backend data-related projects. So everything was new to me.

The way the team welcomed me was really awesome as without their help, I would have never reached the position I am now.

redBus is a company that follows the flat structure that developers and managers are all treated at the same level without hierarchy and also easily approachable on the floor for any concerns or questions (both tech and non-tech).

Still, I remember the tech discussions in the initial days. Those were really interesting where we used to get loads of input and different perspectives of business. The team helped me as a toddler (am recalling the KSRTC logo, sleeping like a baby). If any help was required at any time, the team used to jump in and help. It was really fascinating for me as a new joiner. I got to know that this is the redBus culture which is their core value. And people hired are given the same value.

And also you never feel like “you are isolated or you are doing something alone”. Ultimately I felt that I was involved and my queries were also considered in the discussion (though new to everything). Every day was a new day to me, I got golden opportunities to build and maintain highly scalable systems.

redBus is handling more than a million requests in a day. Am planning to write a separate journal on “Scalability at redBus”. I want to touch up the “redBus culture” before technology because redBus is a people-centric company. Great people come with great power, so we can make any miracles overnight.

From my years of experience, I have never seen a company that provides,

1. Liberty on what you are doing
2. Exploring new opportunities
3. You can directly see and feel how your changes are impacting millions of people
4. Amazing great-minded people
5. CTO (i should mention this, trust me you never see such a CTO, easily approachable and values your thoughts)

Now time to discuss technologies, From my experience redBus is a technology-driven company too, we are open to any technologies especially open source. As our entire microservices are running on AWS, we get opportunities to explore all AWS services.

I really want to share the list of languages/Technologies we are using across redBus

1. Java/Golang/Erlang/python/.net/PHP
2. Node/React/Angularjs/Javascript/GWT
3. Android & iOS
4. Solr
5. Mongo/Click house
6. Mysql/MariaDB
7. Cassandra
8. Storm/Kafka
9. Redis/Memcache
10. DalmatinerDB/Prometheus
11. Redash
12. Grafana/Kibana
13. Zipkin/Jaeger/Sentry
14. Many AWS services

If you wish to explore and add some more technologies

Come and join with us “https://www.linkedin.com/company/redbus_2/jobs/”