In this yet another post about our engineering culture, we shine the spotlight on our featured engineer – Shubham Atlani, Software Development Manager – Verification Suite.
His journey kicked off in the lively city of Nagpur and took him to BITS Pilani Goa Campus, where he graduated in 2013. Fast forward to today, and he’s a seasoned software engineer with a knack for diving into all sorts of industries. From big corporate players to thriving startups, he’s been there, and done that. Think finance, travel, e-commerce, SaaS, semiconductors – you name it, he’s tackled it.
But what really gets his gears turning? Solving real-world puzzles.
He’s all about starting from scratch, building agile products, and then taking them to the next level. And it’s not just about tech – he’s into managing teams, dreaming up innovative ideas, and expanding his network.
Outside the tech bubble, you’ll catch him cherishing family time, cheering on his favourite cricket teams, savouring new cuisines, and sneaking in a bit of gaming here and there.
Stick around as we uncover the story of this dynamic engineer from the Cashfree Engineering team!
1- How did you choose #LifeAtCashfree? What attracted you the most to Cashfree Payments?
India’s fintech ecosystem has been growing rapidly. Having some past work experience in the personal finance space (investment, insurance, etc.), I wanted to explore the B2B fintech side and possibly work on something big as well as relevant enough that could be built and scaled as a platform while allowing me to play a significant role.
Apart from this high-level idea, I was looking for a fast growing organisation that was tech-driven, people-centric, but at the same time culturally balanced, with solid leadership and high growth potential.
After doing my own research about the company and then interviewing with Cashfree Payments, I felt the opportunity met all the above checks, and hence, there was no second thought about it. Now that I’ve been here for almost 3 years, I feel the decision turned out pretty well.
2 – Tell us about the engineering culture at Cashfree Payments. What sets it apart?
Our engineering culture is governed by our organisation’s values, which every engineer follows:
– We are backed by strong engineering leadership with decent depth in our hierarchy. Thanks to our leaders, we’ve managed to build a process-oriented culture over time, which allows us to be more agile, productive, compliant with all regulations, as well as operate more securely and efficiently.
– We work in small teams, where each team is responsible for solving one or more problem areas and has a mix of junior and senior engineers, along with Product Manager(s) and QA(s). Most of the teams follow the Agile Scrum methodology to drive their projects. Every team is headed by an equally competent Engineering Manager who gives the team the necessary direction, drives their roadmap, and looks after the overall growth of the team.
– At an individual level though, every engineer in the team understands their roles and responsibilities, we go one step ahead and promote a high-trust environment where individuals are given more ownership and opportunities to create a bigger impact at their level, allowing them to grow.
– We also have an independent team of Technical Program Managers (TPMs) that enforces best Agile practices, makes collaboration across teams easier, and measures overall progress. Thanks to them, every team has enough clarity on what they are expected to deliver within what timeframe, their dependencies, and what others depend on them. Our OKRs are planned and defined well ahead of time, such that the timelines of our deliverables are much more predictable.
– Being a tech-first company, we’ve got a bias towards automating tasks and finding ways to increase every individual’s productivity. We keep ourselves updated with the latest technological trends in the industry. A lot of thought goes into adopting any new technology to ensure it solves our problems in every way while at the same time being frugal and ensuring low maintenance costs.
– We plan and build common components around any such new technology being introduced to our stack to make sure it is generic at a fundamental level and is easily reusable across different teams. Therefore, our engineers are equipped with the best technical tools so that they can focus more on solving real business problems rather than spending time reinventing the wheel.
– While building new products for our merchants, we don’t lose focus on our engineering excellence activities. Though tech debt is inevitable, we do our best to devote the required time and minimise it by prioritising items like version upgrades, fixing code smells, increasing unit test coverage, code refactoring, etc. The products that we deliver not only solve the needs of our customers but are sustainable over the long term.
– Though we are fast-paced, we don’t compromise quality; our QA engineers heavily rely on their automation test results as part of their overall testing efforts. We make sure our internal decision logs, processes, PRDs, tech specs, designs, etc. are well documented and could be referred to by anyone to easily gain context and reduce their learning curve.
Lastly, we believe that innovation is a necessity for every thriving organisation. We take pride in our ideation process by keeping it open for all, conducting org-wide or even team-specific hackathons at regular intervals, and then pursuing those ideas to turn them into reality.
3 – What are some recent engineering projects you worked on and are extremely proud of?
There are many such examples. I would like to share two of them:
1) Launch of our PPI Issuance stack
We formed a team to focus on our brand new product offering – PPI (Prepaid Payment Instrument) Cards and Wallets Issuance. As part of this Zero to One journey, our team excelled in demonstrating multiple Cashfree values:
– Our engineers wore multiple hats as they not only built this product from scratch, but while they were at it, they became the PPI domain experts; they engaged with our suppliers, studied our competitors, helped our product managers carve out the best possible product, and worked with our Infra team to get the necessary audit done.
– The day this product went live, our customer-obsessed engineers took the initiative to directly engage with our first set of customers on different mediums (emails, chat, calls, etc.) to provide any necessary support to ease their onboarding and gain first-hand feedback about the product they had built.
– We were even awarded the internal ‘Most Agile Team’ Award for the way the delivery of this product was planned and executed within the committed timelines!
2) Growth of our Bank Account Verification Service
Our Bank Account Verification (BAV) offering started as a small feature, built to solve one of our internal use cases of verifying a beneficiary’s bank account before making a payout to them. This was a synchronous API, built by a single engineer, serving thousands of transactions in a day with a not-so-impressive success rate and latency. The idea was to start offering it as a service to our external customers to solve their business use cases around BAV.
Fast forward to today, and BAV is one of the core offerings of our Verification Suite product being built and managed by a dedicated team, processing millions of transactions per day. It’s available in different flavours: synchronous and asynchronous APIs, bulk verification of bank accounts via API, file upload, etc.
Over time, we managed to Achieve Excellence (one of our core values at Cashfree Payments) as our BAV success rate, latency, and uptime metrics improved drastically. With the increase in scale, we have employed techniques like dynamic routing of transactions to optimise our supply-side usage. Our monitoring and alerting tools are so mature as of today that within seconds, our internal teams as well as our customers are notified if there’s any kind of unexpected degradation in performance. The entire engineering effort that went into this has helped us become market leaders in the BAV segment.
Our Verification Suite’s story was recently covered by The Economic Times!
4 – What opportunities for growth and learning are provided to engineers at Cashfree Payments?
Growth and learning are routine for engineers at Cashfree Payments.
We’ve got a very inclusive environment; anyone can reach out to anyone (not just within their function), ask questions, seek guidance, and learn from their peers as well as the experts in the organisation.
Engineers here are motivated to express their ideas and interests, try solving different and more complex problems outside of their comfort zone, and are given the opportunity to align their work accordingly.
We’ve got a team of highly qualified and experienced engineers here who internally form a group called the Design Review Committee (DRC). As an engineer, you can get your ideas or your solutions to some complex problems validated by them. Moreover, these kinds of discussions are open for all to join, so even if you aren’t involved in the discussion directly, you can still be a spectator and derive your learnings.
Other than that, we keep having frequent Book Reading and Tech Talk Sessions at regular intervals, where engineers share their learnings with each other in a common forum and foster an environment of growth for everyone.
As part of their Individual Development Plan (IDP), individuals are encouraged to not just pursue growth in their expected career path but also upskill themselves in other relevant interests outside of their standard functions in the organisation, like public speaking, product/project/people management, etc.
Our engineers are not just focused on the technical aspects but also understand things on the business side, have a say in product development, engage with our customers and suppliers, and drive innovation.
Work with us
Feeling inspired to join our engineering team? We are always on the lookout for great talent!
Have a look at our active openings and apply here. If you don’t find a suitable role, drop a mail to careers@cashfree.com.
