from left: Sergii, Alex, me, Arun, Stanimir, Manuel, Nikhil, Ahmed, Afzal, Olek
While working for PayPal, I was blessed an opportunity to work for Zalando, Berlin with the payments team to build real time machine learning platform layer for the Buy Now Pay Later team that powers the decision whether Zalando could offer customers the option to pay later for the items they have shopped. This might look easy peasy from outside but this indeed is a culmination of best in class engineering doing the actual work. I gladly accepted the offer and moved to the capital Berlin, Germany in November 2020. Fast forward a year, I decided to make my move back to India. Wait What?You moved back from a city like Berlin in just a year
Berlin was great when I look back my time spent there except for the fact that I hated the gloomy weather during winters. Summers were pretty warm and cozy. My professional life was great with exciting challengs including machine learning at Zalando where I was a part of the Buy Now Pay Later engineering team. I worked with a talented international team with people from Bulgaria, Egypt, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, India, USA, etc. I learned a ton during my time at Zalando especially Kubernetes and ML algorithms. The engineering practices at Zalando definitely made me a better engineer. I learned a ton of engineering operational workflows and processes, production on-call, pair programming and my favourite of all Nakadi and Postgres Operator My peers were very smart, humble and helpful. While my career was blooming, my personal life had taken a huge toll. I was unable to make friends and had almost zero social interaction there. Had I stayed longer in Berlin, I would have become a loner and depressed. Moreover, I strongly felt that I needed to stay closer to my family and take care of aging parents. I feel that my relocation to Berlin has struck open my views and re-asses my priorities in life.
What’s cooking next? There’s always a mystery in the air.
Bye Bye Zalando and Berlin until we meet again!
Here are few memories during my stay in Europe
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