Ask Me Anything: Aditya Sanghi -Engineering Manager for PayLater
Editor’s Note:
Today, we want to spotlight Aditya Sanghi, the Engineering Manager for PayLater as he looks back & connects the dots on his journey from a computer science student aspiring to be an engineer in Southern Africa to leading engineering teams in multiple time zones across Southeast Asia today to scale up one of Traveloka’s key finserv businesses under his leadership. Hopefully, we all can learn from his insights & outlooks through the various roles as well as experiences he has had over the years in this AMA style narrative.
Like many software engineering professionals, I also started my programming journey during my high school years (in Southern Africa at the time), followed by a degree in Computer Science in India. Post-graduation, serendipity led me to help build the core systems for an early-stage startup in Jakarta, which accelerated into a unicorn at a colossal scale, as my first gig. The subsequent experience helped to push me towards sharing our success & failure stories in various forums such as meetups or open-source conferences like GopherCon, where I connected with the wider tech community. Moreover, through a series of transitions involving data engineering, fintech platforms, architect roles, etc, I eventually landed as an Engineering Manager for the fintech lending vertical of Traveloka called PayLater.
What is your scope of work or responsibilities as an Engineering Manager for PayLater?
First and foremost, I think of my role in terms of PayLater’s business purpose; bring about a real impact on people’s lives by providing them access to credit & thus enabling them to make meaningful responsible purchases. Secondly, I am responsible for orchestrating the teams, distributed systems, tech strategy, & processes to scale up as well as mitigate the associated risks for consumer lending, digital credit cards, as well as merchant lending. Given that PayLater has an inclusive decision making culture, I act as a facilitator for crowdsourcing ideas & plans at both tactical & strategical levels. Last but not least, I also participate in community growth initiatives such as organising tech meetups, personal mentoring for undergraduate engineering students, & instructing soon at the 2021 Google Bangkit Academy.
Can you share with us your experience in developing PayLater products?
Traveloka Paylater has evolved in an extremely fast-paced ecosystem attributed to the dynamic fintech landscape in SouthEast Asia. PayLater went from zero to one by starting as a modest payment method for Traveloka’s goods & services to a full-fledged financial ecosystem with our own credit cards, B2B-lending, & other innovative digital financing products that are currently in development. Admirably, the team has been able to release all of these services in such a short time span while ensuring a high level of risk hygiene & exercising industry standards engineering best practices. I have been in constant awe of the pervasive creative problem-solving mindset across Traveloka from data science to marketing through the adherence & application of our customer-centric principles as the guiding core of everything that we do.
How do you see your role in providing room for growth & innovation in building PayLater products with technologies?
Fortunately for me, PayLater actively follows a tech-first product strategy, which aligned with my vision to interweave commercial concepts with core computer science complexities & optimize our long-term plans. Another major pillar of this role is looking after the team members & ensuring that their strengths are accurately matched to the right problem statements to set up a win-win ecosystem for everyone. The quintessential endeavour is to ensure that my team members are being set up for success not just in Traveloka but in their long-term careers at a global level. Traveloka also encourages end-to-end ownership & that culture affords my team & I to dive deep into all aspects of the technologies & product from DevOps, Machine Learning, Backend Distributed systems, frontend, & even to UX design for high-octane fintech products.
What are the most challenging parts of your role & how do you deal with or manage to overcome them?
Being gritty & intentionally accustomed to ambiguity is what it takes to succeed in any endeavour. A major, albeit exciting part of my journey, has been figuring out what is the right balance through trials & errors. While there are endless recommendations for succeeding in leading product engineering teams, I have learnt through experience that there is no silver bullet. Therefore, every (aspiring) leader needs to bespoke the fundamental principles that arise from unique contexts. Another challenge was Covid-19 & its devastating impacts on our businesses & teams. Like many others, our teams across multiple time zones were forced into working completely remote. We also had to double down on building systems that diversified our capital sources to sustain the business during this unprecedentedly tough period while upholding the teams’ morale.
What learning experiences or tips & tricks for those aspiring to be a senior engineer or an engineering manager?
The path to relentless growth is built on top of intentional learning & there are no better catalysts than (recoverable) failures. My approach has always been to get out of my comfort zone by saying yes (despite the fear) to as many opportunities (projects, roles, side gigs, etc) as possible. In hindsight, probably none of those opportunities turned out to be perfect (As they say; perfection is the enemy of any progress), but most of them ended up getting the jobs done & adding up valuable learnings for me. Also, I believe that we should leverage the strengths of the people around us. Every person has their own set of skills ranging from technical know-how to people skills. It would be wise to observe, identify, & inculcate these skills to truly scale up our own abilities. This is even more essential for those working in engineering roles as we usually tend to only care about the technical skills and associate little value to the other equally (or sometimes even more) important areas like emotional intelligence & business fundamentals.
Join Our Team
If you share the same (or even more) passion & thirst in embracing & tackling the types of challenges like my team & I do to collectively drive cutting-edge innovations in the fintech space that are impactful to the world, please visit Traveloka’s career page for a comprehensive list of open positions to discover your next journey.
Feel free to also reach out to me as well over at LinkedIn or Twitter for more questions or simply for an open chat :)
