24. November 2020

People @ Personio – Let’s #TECH A BREAK with Sashi Kumar Kumaresan

Sashi Kumar Kumaresan

We took a break and talked with Sashi Kumar Kumaresan, one of our Backend Engineers from the Product & Engineering department in Munich.

Sashi recently published a great blog post about one of his recent challenges: implementing graceful termination in one of the team's legacy PHP services – click here to read it on Medium. Keep reading to find out about his recommendations to keep up with engineering and software topics on a daily basis, plus more insights about his day-to-day work.

What is your role at Personio and what is your favorite part of it?

I work as a Backend Engineer with the Payroll Integrations team at Personio. We build microservices in Kotlin predominantly. One great aspect of being a Backend Engineer is that we get to work closely with Frontend Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, and SREs, which broadens the scope of knowledge we could potentially gather.

My favorite part of my work is the freedom that I get as a developer in building and shipping features to production fairly quickly.

At Personio, we have a first-class CI/CD platform which enables us to iterate quickly and get a faster feedback loop.

What can do you tell us about one of your latest challenges?

One of the challenges that we recently faced was with finding the root cause of random API failures between microservices in Kubernetes. We experimented with different ways to solve the problem, but at first we did not find a proper solution. In the end, we decided to learn what was actually happening under-the-hood in Kubernetes during a network call. We learned a lot through the process, found and fixed the issue which resulted in reducing the failures by 80%. We also published our learnings in this Medium blog post.

Do you have any book or podcast recommendations?

📘 One of my favorite books is Designing Data-Intensive Applications which helped me to understand various concepts in Distributed Systems. I found this book very helpful in understanding and designing microservices.

🎙️ I would also recommend the podcast Software Engineering Daily which keeps me updated with all the latest technologies.

Which value defines your work the best?

Ownership is one of the core values of Personio and I believe it’s one of the values that defines my day-to-day work the best. I try to take complete ownership of features rightfrom development to monitoring their state in production. This helps me to get a complete understanding of how applications run on infrastructure.

100% Personio

What is your ideal teammate like?

My ideal teammate should be passionate about technology and should be open-minded when it comes to making decisions. They should also have fun and enjoy the work even under difficult circumstances.

Smartvillage 2019
Last year at Smartvillage during an offsite Payroll vision workshop with the Payroll tribe (2019)

Would you like to be part of Sashi’s team? Check out our open positions and join us in our way of becoming Europe’s leading HR platform.

Interested in joining Personio? Explore our open roles and find the right job for you!

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