Nilesh Tanwar, an IIT- Roorkee alumnus, shares his incredible journey at AJIO


As 2020 begins, I want to reflect on what I have learnt in the past year. Last year witnessed big changes, leaving campus after spending four years there, moving cities and starting a role as an Engineer-II at AJIO.
What stood out for me the most at AJIO is the knowledge environment that it has created. There's no such thing as knowing too much here.
Let me backtrack to explain this a bit more.
Since childhood, I have been fascinated by science. Learning about new inventions, exploring stories behind technologies, breaking down that electrical engine I got for my birthday and trying (often successfully) to put it back together again was, well, me. My love for science and technology led me to take up a Bachelor’s degree in Geological Technology from IIT-Roorkee.
IIT was a world unto itself. Between running for classes, understanding complex theories, running up endless canteen bills and wasting countless nights to long philosophical discussions, there were interesting projects that transfixed me.
One such project was related to GIS. That’s when I discovered my love for coding and software development. I was hooked. I began to read everything available on Computer Science, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc., became my inspiration. Why? He leads the world's largest technology company and is from a non-Computer Science background too. This gave me the confidence to explore a career in Computer Science.
Luckily for me, Reliance Jio came to our campus to hire Software Engineers for their platform engineering groups. I applied immediately, interviewed and waited anxiously. The interview convinced me that I wanted this role, desperately! Rationale - the interview was an eye-opener. I was enticed by the scale of operations at Jio, the massive vision they had for retail and e-commerce, the tech stack at use and the nature of projects that freshers got to work on. I wanted IN!
Needless to say, the joy I felt when I got selected was indescribable.
The first few weeks were intense. The induction programme was detailed, structured and fast-paced. Over 108 engineers were hired from premier colleges in India and housed at the Reliance Corporate Park (RCP) in Mumbai.
After the induction programme, there was another bootcamp of 2 weeks which was focused on open-source tech stacks and production prototyping. We got an opportunity to explore a new bootcamp platform called Crio.do; it helped in collaborating with other fellow coders and in sprucing up our coding chops. Each of us got a mentor, and my mentor ensured that I knew everything that I needed to on coding and problem-solving. We were also given the opportunity to work on real-world applications. I worked on building apps for online food delivery and understood peripheral systems that run the business. I learnt a lot from this experience. The HR team also organized various icebreakers and bonding sessions to make us feel comfortable in our new roles. When my team moved to the Bangalore office, there was no chaos or confusion because everything was well managed and coordinated.
For the past six months, I have been working as a Software Engineer with the AJIO B2B (also called AJIO Business) Payment Engine team. Even as a fresher, I have been entrusted to build complex programs for introducing credit systems and different modes of payments to small-scale merchants. Building an entire payment gateway from scratch and ensuring its ease of use for local kirana stores has been anything but simple!
There is a deep sense of purpose that fuels the work we do here. AJIO Business is solving problems that have not yet been solved by creating an e-commerce platform for kirana stores and manufacturers. There are no copy-paste solutions, only complex interconnected challenges that need new approaches. Exposure to an array of technologies has been a plus too. I attended workshops on Spring Boot and developed REST APIs and microservices for the Kirana Project.
I am excited about my role and contribution at AJIO. The aspirations of getting to work on complex challenges, with a fun peer group, and learning by practicing, failing and rectifying has been rewarding.


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