Tech
Aug 31, 2022
Meet Rashmi, Software Engineer at Wolt
Our engineers build the technologies powering Wolt. We now operate in 23 countries and our apps connect millions of customers, hundreds of thousands of courier partners and tens of thousands of shops and restaurants. This means, our product teams build for scale, need to be laser-focused on customers and spend their time solving lots of interesting, complex problems.
Rashmi is one of our software engineers based in our Berlin office. Let’s hear from her what it’s like to work on building our Finance products at Wolt.
Hello 👋 Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at Wolt?
My name is Rashmi and I’m a Software Engineer here at Wolt. I’m from India, but currently live in Berlin where I moved about 3 years ago. Before joining Wolt I used to work for a mobile banking app. I was looking for a change as I wanted to mix things up a little bit and work with different teams and technologies. So here I am now at Wolt, exploring it still!
Describe the purpose of your job at Wolt to someone from another planet 👽
Well, I think if there’s someone from another planet asking about this I imagine them being very smart and have some understanding about software engineering, so probably I shouldn’t simplify this too much! But, the purpose of my job as a Software Engineer is about understanding what needs to be done to build the product itself and then translating it to code so that the machine would understand it as well and do what we want it to do. Of course, it’s also important to make sure that these instructions are tested , work consistently and written in a nice and clean way so that the next person can easily maintain it.
Why did you decide to join Wolt?
I always like to explore different domains and companies to see how they work as it is a great way to build experience. So I was looking for a new domain that I was unfamiliar with and this one job at Wolt that I found on LinkedIn seemed interesting.I already knew about Wolt since I’d used it before, but I had a better look at the tech part of it and I found that very interesting. I also really liked the whole hiring process since it was very transparent and it was nice to meet everyone in the interviews. I felt that it's a good fit and Wolt has met my expectations both domain- and tech-wise!
What does your team do here at Wolt?
My team is called Invoicing Tech team and we’re a part of the larger Finance Group at Wolt. In Finance, we have different teams who are taking care of the different parts of the finance flow, but in Invoicing Tech, as the name suggests, we have services that mainly deal with making sure that all purchases have correct invoices and that the relevant documents are reported to the tax authorities. My team makes sure that everything is correct on that end, which is of course very important as these details get audited and checked by regulators.
In three words how would you describe the Finance team at Wolt?
👉 Competent: it's amazing to work with super competent people and learn from each other.
👉 Compliant: this is expected, as it’s finance and we absolutely have to make sure that we make no mistakes (or at least correct the mistakes).
👉 Collaborative: in a sense we have different goals for each team, but we work closely together. For example, if something breaks or if someone has trouble with anything, the whole Finance team pitches in and redirects the issue to whoever knows how to fix it best. This collaboration is true for the whole of Wolt!
What’s been your favorite project at Wolt and why?
We’re doing quite a few things and our priorities sometimes change because of regulations, for instance. One of the interesting things is trying to get out of our Restaurant API monolith and bring everything related to invoicing into our Invoicing Tech services. It’s still an ongoing migration and on the day of this chat we’ve migrated 13 out of 23 countries already. It’s a satisfying process since doing this project helps to simplify things because it’s easier to maintain it in our invoicing service than in the restaurant API. We’ve configured the whole process very nicely, so at this point it’s not that difficult to migrate a new country to our invoicing service, unless, of course, there’s some country-specific exceptions involved. Since it’s such a huge task, we celebrate every time we complete the migration process for one of the countries, so there’s still a few celebrations awaiting us! 🎉
What’s been your biggest learning at Wolt?
I think the best thing has been seeing how people are really open to new ideas at Wolt. For example, when one of our team members suggested trying out Golang for our new service for tax reporting, the team was super supportive of this idea, and so now we’re developing this new service in Go! I also really liked how we decided to implement this idea because after the mutual decision about the language was made, we had a “Go day” during which all of us in the team just blocked this whole day from meetings and other things and started learning how to use Go and we also went through tutorials together since some of us have never used it before. It was a really helpful way of learning together.
Another big learning point for me was that at Wolt most of our services are resilient and fault-tolerant because there's so much care being put into building them from scratch, this way making the basis of the service sturdy. A lot of other companies are still trying to achieve it and I’ve noticed that if something breaks in here, it’s relatively easy to fix and recover.
What are you most excited about in your work right now?
We’re building a new service for tax support and we have a deadline for it by which we have to be done, otherwise we’ll have to close the operations down in the country because of the regulations. This is exciting because there's a deadline, but we’ll be fine, we just need to make sure that we have it well-tested, we’ll then take on more countries for tax reporting.
Where do you go to learn about engineering?
When it comes to engineering I find it easiest to learn about new things from videos because I can see what’s being taught with coding in action. So in that way I can follow along easily and then try to do it myself. I usually look up courses on Udemy or Coursera and also read blogs.
What do you do in your free time? Do you have a side hustle?
Since I’ve lived in Germany for about three years now, I spent quite a bit of my time learning German 🇩🇪. I like learning new languages and also want to live here for a longer time. Other than that, I love hiking and biking in and around Berlin — I think it’s a great way to explore the city.
In terms of side hustles, back in India I used to do a bit of teaching. I taught different subjects, math and such. It was great to interact with the kids. I haven’t explored this option in Germany yet, but maybe I’ll get back into doing some volunteer work over here later on as well!
