Two Months at Quantifai

What a journey it has been! The past two months have been incredibly fast-paced, with a lot of responsibility, constant learning, and a strong focus on building and shipping quality products quickly.

One of the things I enjoy most about working at a startup is that you get to see the entire journey of a product. You are not limited to one small part of the system. You get to understand the problem, build the solution, deal with edge cases, and see how it behaves in the real world.

A Wide Range of Learning

Over these two months, I've been exposed to a wide range of technologies, engineering problems, and concepts:

• Backend Technologies: Implemented RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), worked on optimizing query and API call performance, reducing rendering time by a couple of seconds, and worked with queue-based services.

• Product Development: Built the first version of an entire product for the Accounts Payable domain from a PRD in around 20 days. This was one of the most interesting experiences because it involved understanding the requirements, making engineering decisions, and actually turning them into a working product.

• Data Engineering: Worked with data pipelines and got a much better understanding of how data moves through different parts of a system. I also learned more about the system design decisions involved in building reliable and scalable pipelines.

• Domain Knowledge: Learned a lot about finance and accounting. This has probably been one of the most valuable parts of the experience because financial software has a huge number of edge cases. A small assumption that works in a normal application can easily break when you're dealing with financial data, so testing and correctness matter a lot.

Scale and Architecture

The scale we're working with is impressive. A team of around 4-5 people is building and maintaining systems that process around 11 crore transactions every month.

Working at this scale has helped me understand several concepts much better:

• Web-Queue-Worker Architecture: Learned why separating web requests, queues, and background workers becomes important as the system grows. It allows expensive or asynchronous tasks to be processed independently without blocking user-facing requests.

• Message Queues: Worked with RabbitMQ and learned more about how message queues help decouple services, handle background processing, and build more resilient distributed systems.

• Cost Analysis: Got exposure to the business side of engineering as well, including understanding how projects and services are priced and how infrastructure and operational costs affect those decisions.

• LLM Operations: Explored how LLMs can be integrated into production workflows and learned about the practical challenges involved in managing LLM-based pipelines.

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Even with this scale and the critical nature of the systems we're building, we're getting the opportunity to own major sections of the project. That level of responsibility has been both challenging and rewarding.

I've also had the opportunity to learn directly from the founder, especially about how to think about products from a business perspective, how to pitch solutions to billion-dollar companies, and how different the requirements become when you're building financial software for enterprise customers.

The learning curve is steep, but that's exactly what makes this experience so valuable. In just two months, I've learned things that would have taken much longer to understand through coursework or side projects alone.

And honestly, I'm looking forward to seeing what the next few months bring.

Here's an ASCII art: