Nitin joined Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) 18 months ago, just after he completed his bachelor’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. Since he joined us, he has settled into our unique engineering culture and experienced the phenomenal growth that has come to define the OCI experience for new joiners.
“OCI is the perfect place for software developers who are fresh out of college,” he confirms. “We’ve got the latest tech stack, the ideal work-life balance, and it’s just so employee friendly. For campus grads who are just making their entry into the corporate world, I would say Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is easily one of the best places you could kick-start you career. It will open up a whole new world of opportunities.”
Data integration—what’s that?
Nitin’s team delivers a data integration service for the OCI ecosystem. It allows customers to easily shape and load data at scale into data lakes and data warehouses for data science and analytics purposes.
“We build and deliver a fully managed, serverless, native, cloud service that helps you with common extract, load, and transform (ETL) tasks such as ingesting data from different sources, cleansing, transforming, and reshaping that data, and then efficiently loading it to target data sources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” he explains.
Nitin’s works as a back-end developer on OCI’s data integration service. “My team works on designing and developing a distributed system for handling the execution of tasks, parallel processing of large data volumes, and traffic routing under heavy message load scenarios via message brokers to integrate various multi-tenant services, while controlling security at an instance/virtual machine level.”
New tools and technologies
If that sounded intimidating, don’t worry. Before Nitin joined OCI, he had never been exposed to this space either. “When I joined from campus, I was completely new to the world of microservices and cloud,” he reveals. “I primarily worked on C++ and Python during my college days. When I joined Oracle, I got some interesting development experience with Java, Spring Boot microservices, and RESTful web services.”
Nitin quickly assimilated to his new domain thanks to lots of hands-on learning and training. “I got to learn several new tools, technologies, and frameworks such as Gradle, Docker, Spring boot, Kafka, Prometheus, and Grafana to name a few,” he lists. “I also got to know how scrum teams work in Agile methodology. As part of my role, I regularly work on feature enhancements, bugs, infrastructure, and monitoring.”
Collaboration is king
For Nitin, one of best parts of working in microservices architecture is the exposure he gets to other areas that he finds exciting. “I love working with cross-functional teams,” he shares. “I interact with people with different skillsets and gain lots of new learnings along the way. For example, I got the chance to develop my debugging skills while fixing issues in the production environment.”
Collaboration at OCI includes daily stand-up meetings where Nitin’s teammates discuss problems and accomplishments amongst themselves and with senior management. He’s found this kind of knowledge sharing extremely helpful on his development journey.
“Having my code reviewed by experts with years of experience in the software industry is a great source of learning and demonstrates how to improve software quality by reducing defects upstream,” he describes. “In such a short span of time, I can see incredible growth in my skillset. In the last year, I’ve worked on creating proof of concepts for new tools, getting involved in design discussions, debugging issues in the production environment, and developing new features end-to-end which are directly used by our customers.”
Soaring in the cloud
In terms of inspiration, Nitin finds there’s lots to keep him motivated at OCI. “OCI has excellent work-life balance,” he notes. “I’m working on really cool stuff with exciting technologies, and I have time for myself to hang out with friends, develop my skills, and pursue my hobbies.”
His direct impact on customers gets him amped up too. “The feeling when our customers appreciate the features we’ve developed is beyond explanation,” he shares. “Plus, Oracle is just a great place to be right now. We’re a leading database developer that’s blazing a trail in the cloud market with accelerated infrastructure expansion, by adding more data centers around the world.”
Nitin also points out that Oracle Cloud is more comprehensive and integrated than any other cloud. “Oracle’s Gen 2 cloud is combined with a rich suite of business applications and our industry-leading Autonomous Database powers them with a much higher level of security by design, fulfilling all the components of a successful public cloud. It’s an exciting backdrop for our team, knowing that our cloud is gaining more and more momentum with big players like Zoom and FedEx.”
The interview process
For some college students, the transition from campus to the professional world can seem like a daunting task. Nitin, however, was pleasantly surprised by how intuitive it all was. That’s why he thinks it will be helpful for students to hear what it’s really like—starting with the interview process.
“I interviewed for Oracle during campus hiring season at my alma mater,” he remembers. “The process was very smooth, all the interviewers were experienced, perfectly trained, and friendly. There were four rounds of interviews in total. The first round was mainly focused on data structures and algorithms, the second on low level designing and OOPs concepts. The third round focused on database and normalization concepts along with a few basic algorithmic questions. The fourth and final round was more of a general discussion on my projects and interests.”
Onboarding and beyond
When the big day finally came, Nitin was both nervous and excited for what lay in store—but he needn’t have been nervous at all. “Onboarding was seamless,” he says. “There was an orientation session during my first two days which I went to with all the other campus hires who joined with me. The first thing I noticed was that OCI really meant it when they said we have a values-driven engineering culture, because we were given a complete overview of it at onboarding.”
After the orientation session, Nitin met his manager, was shown his workspace, and introduced to his team. After that, he undertook a month’s technical training to get industry-ready. Then it was time to officially join the team!
“After joining my team, I benefitted from another two-day induction session to get us familiarized with the OCI services and to lay out our expectations,” he describes. “Not only were my team ready for me to start, they made sure I understood that I was valued, welcomed, and a significant part of the team. With that, my confidence levels soared and I knew I’d made the right choice to join this company.”
When the real work began, Nitin found he could hit the ground running thanks to strong support from his team. “The senior developers here are very understanding, experienced, and motivated,” he affirms. “They assign you work on the basis of your skillset and get you incrementally familiarized with the entire codebase. My teammates and manager were always there for me whenever I had any doubt or faced any problem. You’ll find some of the best mentors at OCI who will guide you at each and every point.”
The future looks bright
When it comes to the future, Nitin has no plans of slowing down his learning curve. “My long-term goals involve growing within OCI where I can continue to learn, take on additional responsibilities, and contribute as much value as possible to the team. I really love that OCI emphasizes professional development opportunities. I plan to take full advantage of the educational resources and certifications available. In a few years, I’d love to thoroughly understand the product development lifecycle and be able to conceptualize, plan, and build out complex projects.”
Finally, he leaves future engineers with three pieces of knowledge he’s gained from his time at OCI.
- Focus on the fundamentals before flash. Nailing the basics first will always guide you towards a better, more advanced solution.
- Keep developing your skillset!
- Get used to change. Things move fast—you need to be able to move with them and pick things up quickly.
Want to join the team? We’re hiring in India! Explore the career opportunities at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and create the future with us.