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What it’s Like to be Part of Unibuddy’s Hydrocarbon Squad

Unibuddy office employee

When I joined Unibuddy as a Mobile Engineer earlier this year, the company had just raised $20m in Series B funding and were looking toward the next stage of their journey. Now I’m a part of that, and we’re building for the next milestone and growing our engineering and product team to offer an even more comprehensive product suite. So if you’re looking for your next Engineering role, here’s a bit about what it’s like to work at Unibuddy.

What you can expect from an interview at Unibuddy

Because I started at Unibuddy during the pandemic, my entire interview process was completely virtual. Unibuddy has adapted to the world of remote and hybrid working over the last 18 months, so virtual interviews have become the norm for both the tech and commercial teams across the globe.

The process began with an initial screening, which was around 45 minutes long. I was asked about my past experience, as well as a few questions on my knowledge in Mobile Application development. This round also finished with a small coding session and subsequent discussion. 

I was then invited to attend two technical rounds, which were just over an hour each. During these rounds, there were questions to solve, real-time problems to optimise, and a repo to work on. For the repo, I was asked to review the code before being quizzed on the maintainability, optimisations, and testing approaches.

I then spoke with Unibuddy’s CTO, Kimeshan Naidoo, for 30 minutes, and took part in a culture ‘add’ interview with some of the other members of the team. The panelists asked me some interesting questions on team building, past experiences, and personal development, before offering me time to ask my own questions about the company.

The day-to-day of working in the tech team

I’ve been at Unibuddy for just short of six months now, and each day is different from the last. That being said, here’s a little bit of an overview of what you can expect from life on one of the Unibuddy squads.

Each day begins with a morning standup (with my cheerful squad!) where we quickly discuss the things we’re working on, such as tickets/features or any blockers that need to be approached. As well as the daily standups, we also meet bi-weekly to do our sprint planning and refinement session among our squad.

From the standup, I start my “add-commit-pull-push” as usual, check my product board, and keep myself on track. 

Other meetings that we get involved in are often when the whole tech team works together on guild meetings and tech huddles, where we mostly discuss tech-related bits such as industry news, conventions, and new things we’ve learned since we last met. Here, if it’s technical, we will discuss it!

Away from all the product talk, I also have a bi-weekly, casual one-to-one session with my engineering mentor. We take this time to simply discuss things outside of work, and it’s great to have a mentor to check up on me, my well-being and to help me out on my career track and progression (for which we use a tool called Lattice). I find this session to be something very uncommon at other startups, but Unibuddy is stringent on these catch-ups, which I appreciate.

And on Friday (Friyay!), the whole of Unibuddy meets virtually for our Company Huddle, where we all come together to cherish our weekly wins and for the much-awaited “Who Am I?” session from new starters that joined in the past week. This is a great way to get to know people both inside and outside of your team and to find common interests.

Startup benefits

First and foremost, Unibuddy cares about each individual Buddy and their development. A personal project time of 2 weeks is allocated every year for engineers to work on their individual goals, with 80,000 INR per year on top of that to put towards books, online courses or attending conferences. On top of that, the working-from-home setup is completely taken care of by Unibuddy.

There are too many to list, but I do think it’s worth mentioning the monthly social outings at some of the coolest places I’ve been to as some of my personal highlights from my time so far. Check out our job opportunities to read more about some of the benefits of working at Unibuddy.

What makes Unibuddy great

After just a few months here, I’ve been able to see that the Unibuddy team strives for quality in what we do, and as a team, we always try to implement it in the best possible ways.

That could be CI/CD, testing pipelines, peer-to-peer coding, software conventions, or just about anything and everything else. In every iteration, it’s ensured that these principles are followed and implemented. We will easily find contentment in our work when we are at par with the industry standards.

Unibuddy always keeps an eye on the team, and an extra effort is always made when it’s needed the most. Multiple tools keep employee well-being on track and ensure psychological safety at work. I’ve really appreciated the steps Unibuddy has taken to help us avoid burnout. 

If you’re interested in joining the team here at Unibuddy, check out some of our open roles over on our careers page.

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