Carta was the first startup (and a unicorn too, see this!) that I joined.
At Carta, I was immediately thrown into high business-impact work, and exposed to an incredible amount of talented individuals and emerging technologies.
During my first week at Carta, my mentor told me outright: "You are going to reduce the clearing time for ACH transactions by 24 hours"
I replied, "you're messing with me, right?", but he was serious! The actual change needed to implement it was a single line, just a slight refactor on transaction processing logic. This gave me experience rapidly getting a codebase setup, understanding the codebase, testing my changes, and deploying to production, and validating the deployment. I shipped a full change that was vital to the business end-to-end, within my first few days. I felt like a full time employee.
From that absurd-sounding initial change I made after joining, I quickly ramped up, bootstrapped by the high quality engineers I was surrounded by and the extensive library of resources available to me.
I began learning gRPC and started working more with Python, Django, and gRPC to implement gRPC endpoints and handlers that would allow Carta customers to verify their bank accounts using micro-deposits. We would send clients two small deposits into their bank account and ask them to enter those two values back on the Carta platform to verify their account. Although this seemed simple, there was an extensive amount of work that needed to be done to make this happen, I even got to work with finite state machines to model the verification statuses!
Since I was on the Financial Products team, I worked closely with the treasury team. A majority of my work for my first internship at Carta revolved around improving money-variance reporting pipelines and transaction processing to provide Treasury with powerful options for investigating transactions. I had a strong impact on Treasury's ability to reconcile variances and ensure funds are being sent correctly.
I enjoyed my work at Carta so much that I decided to return, to work with Carta for the Winter '23 season. I figured that since I was already onboarded, and was familiar with the codebase, I could jump right in and learn more, contribute more, and do more than last term.
I was correct, I immediately set to work on a large design document that detailed a large domain-decomposition and architecture change. I spent roughly a month on this document, conversing with other engineers, product leads, and many more people. The document was approved and was made into actionable items organization-wide. I'd never formally worked on a design document before, and this opened my eyes to a whole other aspect of engineering. I learned how to connect with the correct stakeholders and ask questions, I learned how to analyze a codebase down to the minute details, and I learned how to come up with feasible, actionable plans with many alternatives and fallbacks.
This period of time that I was working at Carta (Jan - April 2022) was also around when the whole Russia-Ukraine situation happened. Carta, being a finance company, needed to ensure that it was compliant with U.S regulations and laws regarding sanctions. I got the privilege of seeing how sanctions work behind the scenes and implemented sanction-blocks for SWIFT codes and regions myself!
Being more experienced with the codebase, I had the opportunity to dive deeper into transaction processing and modelling using finite state machines in Python. When I learned about state machines in school, I never thought I'd be able to see it used in practice and work on them immediately!
Perhaps my proudest achievement during my time at Carta was winning the internal hackathon. Another engineer, a project manager, and I, set out to create a hackathon project but had no idea of the impact it would create within Carta. Our hackathon idea was to find a way to extract revenue from when a Carta customer gets acquired by another company. I'm not able to share the details, but we created a $43 Million USD estimated revenue stream for Carta through our hackathon project. We won first place in the hackathon and there were clients lined up to use the new feature!!
Finally, I think the most underrated part about working at a fintech company is the financial knowledge you gain along the way. I learned about equity, how liquidity works, tender offers, mergers and acquisitions, how large tech enterprises move money, how business-to-bank communication works, and so much more.
Working two terms at Carta helped me grow in an incredible way. I went from pushing small features and exploring the codebase to creating new revenue streams for the company, proposing system/architecture changes, modelling complicated transaction logic, and much more.