A day in the life of an Engineer at Setu

Setu is a financial infrastructure company providing the right arsenal to build financial products for millions of Indians. At Setu, we always built products with two aspects in mind—providing Indians with different financial products, and making developers’ lives easier, especially those who are building these products. With technology at the core of our operations, engineering is a crucial piece if not the most important piece to the puzzle that is Setu.

Being an engineer here opens up multiple doors to work on crucial products that will make an impact on millions of Indians. This presents a new challenge, and an opportunity to learn, grow and contribute every single day.

Let’s break into a day in the life of a Setu engineer and see what it looks like!

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Coding — 40 to 50%#

GIF from Ashiqur Rahman

Our tech stack at Setu#

Frontend — TypeScript/JavaScript, React with Redux, Next.js

Backend — Python3, Flask, OpenAPI, Go

Infrastructure — Docker, Terraform, AWS, ELK

Let’s define what do we actually mean by coding:

• Develop/build services and features or modify existing ones in frontend, backend, or both.

• Setting up and maintaining infrastructure

• Fixing bugs, improving code base and documentation

Based on the product and its current phase, we work on different coding aspects: new features, revamp, debugging, maintenance, and stability.

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Management — 15 to 20%#

“Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity.” — Nat Turner

Managing time and work is a crucial part of the day and a hard one to get a hold of. To help with this, daily stand-ups happen with managers, leads, and respective teams to discuss what happened yesterday, what will happen today, and blockers in their work, so as to provide the right information and resources to unblock.

This will ensure everyone is on the same page of the product roadmap. This also sets a ballpark for expectations and provides more clarity on the present and the future. At Setu, we’ve set up every Wednesday of the week to be our “No meeting day”! Yes, you heard that right. On that day, there are no meetings, so folks can focus on being fully productive.

Our operations stack includes Slack, Google Suite, Zoom, JIRA, Confluence, and Wiki (that acts like our intranet).

Management activities fall mainly into two types—

• Planning: Tickets, sprint rituals (grooming, planning), etc.

• Meetings: Stand-ups, clarification calls, etc.

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Review and Feedback — 10 to 15%#

We at Setu, ensure a very tight and close feedback loop with everyone. This helps people understand what is going well, what can be improved, and basically puts you on the right track for success.

Major types of reviews and feedback:

• Code review

• Project review and feedback

• 1-on-1 with managers at a regular cadence

Setu engineers love pair-programming and code review as this helps us get familiar with coding styles, best practices and learn techniques from different perspectives brought on board by a diverse set of engineers.

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Cooler time — 5 to 10%#

We, Setu engineers, are known for our meme game. We have dedicated channels on our Slack workspace to post memes (only OG memes are allowed :P), play games, share ideas and music playlists in our free time.

We at Setu make sure everyone overcommunicates with what’s happening in and around the company. Since everyone’s working remotely, we hope this practice makes sure that everyone is looped in on the latest happenings and announcements!

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Setu is rapidly growing, which means that we’re constantly on the lookout for leaders and thinkers who can aggressively contribute to our vision and help drive it — in their own way. And we like to show that we care with a plethora of perks and monetary incentives.

We have a long way to go and we’re all about taking our people along for the ride. It’s important that our people progress because so does the company. You can be assured that your growth is high stakes for us.

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.

We’re hiring across the board — for payments, lending, data, and fixed deposits. Go over to setu.co/careers to apply or write to careers@setu.co if you have any questions.