15 years in Software Engineering

A reflection on how the last 5 years went, ups and downs and lessons that I’ve drawn from it.

I recently completed 15 years in the Software Industry. 🎉

Back in June 2021, when I reflected on my first decade in 10 years of Software Testing and Automation career, I felt quite proud of my achievement of that milestone,

The world at 15 years old feels different, Software Engineering has been taken over by AI chatter everywhere and it feels like that is one of the top of mind topics for everyone, leading to transformational changes everywhere. These past 5 years were intense and I personally learned and grew a lot. I feel like I’ve developed a more nuanced intuition about Software engineering, my career path, direction and preferences as well.

I found a path to working at 2 of the world’s top tech companies (Meta and Microsoft) and a fast paced intense startup (CRED). In this blog, I sit down to reflect and share some of the high lights/low lights and lessons. This half decade has also been an exercise in humility and gratitude wherein I’ve realised quite clearly the depth of what I still don’t know, my own limitations and what I need to learn to grow.

So what are the major highlights? Let me try to paint a broad picture first and then get into some details.

From a career standpoint:

1. Flash back to June 2021, I was playing an Engineering manager role at Gojek Bangalore leading a team of 10 engineers with 3 leads.

2. At the end of 2021, a really fantastic opportunity presented itself, and I decided to grab it and relocated to Meta London as a Senior Software engineer. I worked on core Test infrastructure for WhatsApp, travelled to different cities in the UK and Europe and got the first hand taste of life as an NRI (Non Resident Indian). It truly gave me a new life and career perspective.

3. In mid 2023, I relocated back to Bangalore and joined CRED as a Principal Software Engineer. I worked in the Lending and Credit card domain and primarily focussed on scaled backend automated testing with gRPC, AWS stack, mentored 15+ engineers and shipped major revenue generating projects in CoLending and compliance space. This was my first foray into the FinTech world.

4. Lastly, I joined Microsoft, Bangalore in mid 2025 as a Senior Software Engineer building Test infrastructure for Teams Mobile working in a fantastic learning environment. As I write this, I also completed my 1st year as a Microsoftie and it’s been a lot of fun.

From a side hustle perspective:

1. I grew my LinkedIn presence to 10K organic followers, building a much stronger and diverse network.

2. I saw a surge in blog readership with 10K new global readers in 2025 alone, primarily coming from India, China, and the US.

3. I delivered 4 talks at major industry events like AppiumConf, SeleniumConf and TribeQonf and 3 podcasts.

4. Started a YouTube channel with content on Espresso, Java, Gen AI and quite recently Interviewing

5. Kicked off this newsletter to share more frequent updates and insights and grew to 900 subscribers with few paid ones as well.

6. Started mentoring on Topmate.

So yeah, a lot has happened.

I’ll group the events in the context of companies I worked at to give it a rough timeline structure. A side benefit of writing blogs is that you can reflect back on the blog posts as breadcrumbs and get a sense of what was going on at that time.

Chapter 1: Meta London

In Sept 2021, one of my life’s big moments arrived when I got an offer to join Meta London as a Senior Software Engineer (L5) in WhatsApp Test Infrastructure team. I wrote all about the details of the Interview process, my approach to prep in How I got “that” job at Meta if you are curious. I’ve found myself sharing this blog many times and it remains one of the top read blogs on my blog site.