Shrey Shah
The last 5 months have been nothing less than spectacular. I was in high doubt about Qubole at the time of giving preferences for my PS-2. Seniors convinced me that Qubole would be a great choice. Today, I feel proud to say that seniors were damn right! I too would surely suggest Qubole to any junior who asks me about the company. This was my first industry experience and I’m sure this is going to help me a lot in the coming future. There have been various aspects about Qubole that I’ve loved. These include the product idea, the quality of tech, thrive to bring in new features to remain on top of the market, culture and surely the people around me.
The idea of providing Big Data-as-a-Service was very unique when Qubole started. This has helped huge enterprises to run large-scale queries and perform analysis at the ease of a click. Due to such cloud offerings, companies no longer need to hire dedicated engineers which will maintain their data and develop the technology to do analytics on top of it. One key point which proves that this idea is revolutionary is that seeing Qubole, a lot of other companies, and some of them huge ones, have started entering this area of the Computer Science industry.
I have worked with Rajat Venkatesh quite closely. The dedication he has to bring up new features and even integrate two different fields of Computer Science together (Databases + ML for Tenali) is super motivating. I have seen very unique features like the Rubix cache, the first of its kind to support caching in Big Data Engines. This type of dedicated research is surely going to help the company a lot!
As an intern, I was given some very important work rather than just some sidelined work, which the company did not have on their schedule. I worked mainly in the drivers team and the presto team with Uday, Ankit and Shubham very closely. The knowledge they have about presto and programming in general is tremendous. I’ve learnt a lot of programming practices and industry standards during my time here. They’ve always helped me even with the silliest doubt I might have asked. The cross-team integration and helpfulness is quite good. This avoided any delays I might have faced due to issues understanding details of other components.
I would like to applaud the dev-ops work done in the company. Simple Jenkins jobs and shell utilities have made tough commands so simple. The greatest tool I used was surely Qubole-in-a-Box. The ability to spin up a complete environment on demand for each developer to suit his/her development and debugging needs is just amazing.
Apart from the tech work, the overall company culture is very jolly and melodious. The people around tend to enjoy themselves a lot. I will miss the weekly board-games night every Thursday. The HR folks keep on organizing more events to make sure that the employees keep in touch with one another and enjoy the atmosphere.
Lastly, I would like to thank Qubole India for giving me this wonderful opportunity which made sure I end my bachelor degree on a high note! After doing my higher studies at Cornell University for a year, starting this fall, I wish and hope to work for Qubole, preferably in the US (:p).
Cheers!
Shrey
