My First Week at Quantifai

This blog series is about my journey at Quantifai, a young startup, as an SDE intern. I obviously can't share anything about the products and codebase, but I'll share in this series more about what I learn as an engineer.

Before I Start

The interview process was 2 rounds (I guess there were around 60 applicants roughly, out of which 3 of us were selected). Interviews were more about our thinking ability and brainstorming. They covered a wide variety of domains, from systems design to ML, and a little bit of DSA for me.

The main aim, I felt, was finding people who are technically sound and can focus on adapting / learning the business logic ... which is more important , the ability to think and plan actions, design systems, instead of blindly vibe coding.

My First Week at Quantifai

It started with a few meets with different people working at the startup. Everybody was very chill and friendly. The culture here is very different from what you have at a big tech company (though I'm not hired at a big tech as of now lmao), big tech feels very formal and artificial. It's a team of around only 10 people, so reaching out to anyone is fairly easy and everyone is helpful.

Anyone can code, but we had to learn / understand the business side of things first.

Financial reconciliation — the most important phrase I felt, as most of the work goes into this area. Imagine a scenario where you have multiple sources of financial info: from ERP, email, different formats, images, PDFs, and so much info flowing in ... purchase orders, invoices, and whatnot. Accounting departments bang their heads handling all this. Quantifai's different products help solve such issues. It's not one product but multiple, for different scenarios, which were introduced to us at a high level, as it could be overwhelming to throw everything at us at the same time.

So this week was more about getting acquainted with financial terminologies and understanding the essence of reconciliation.

Though there's not much to write about this week apart from theory, we also got our laptops and got assigned a new project. So excited to work on it, and maybe I'll learn a thing or two that I can write about next.