Senior software engineer: What I do and how much I make
About this video
Ram Kandasamy, a 29-year-old senior software engineer at AppLovin earning $160,000 a year, works on the platform team that builds infrastructure to serve mobile ads at scale. He explains his work on the big data cluster, how expectations grow from following tasks to owning a product area, and how finishing his first project in a week felt.
You'll be able to
- describe what AppLovin's platform team does.
- explain Ram's two main responsibilities with the big data cluster.
- explain how expectations change as a software engineer gains experience.
Key words
- Infrastructure
- The behind-the-scenes systems that let a service run for many users.
- At scale
- Working for a very large number of users or requests at once.
- Big data cluster
- A group of connected computers that stores and processes huge amounts of data.
- Fraud analysis
- Using data to spot cheating or fake activity.
- Programming stack
- The set of languages and tools a company uses to build its software.
Transcript
I'm Ram Kandasamy. I'm 29 years old. I'm a senior software engineer at Applovin and I make 160 thousand dollars a year. Let's say you're playing a game on your phone and then you're interrupted by an ad. That ad is what Applovin does. We serve ads. I work on the platform team.
The primary responsibility of the platform team is to build the infrastructure that allows us to serve these ads at scale. Specifically what I do, I have two main responsibilities. The first is to work on the big data cluster. This big data cluster basically stores all of our data.
My main responsibility there is to build tools that'll help other teams within the company access the data and run numbers on the data in a very fast and efficient manner. My second responsibility is to also make use of this cluster to do some production use cases on user and fraud analysis.
When you're starting out as a software engineer almost everything you do it's, kind of, do this, do that. It's very much like, "Here's a task. "Here's how you should code it. "Go ahead and do it." But, as you spend more years in industry, you're kind of expected almost to think of different ways to optimize your own product.
In effect, you're supposed to own a product or own an area of the company. Your primary goal should be to implement what management deems is the goals for the organization. A secondary responsibility for yourself should be to figure out what are the weaknesses of the product?
How could I use my engineering knowledge to make those weaknesses better? I would say my favorite day at the office was probably the day that I finished my first project. Coming into Applovin, it's a little bit intimidating because they continue to be a very successful company.
When you first start at a company, you're eager to prove yourself and to prove that you belong. The first project I did, they wanted it done very quickly. So, I had to learn all about their programming stack and how they structure their code and everything in addition to actually solving the problem that I was faced with.
To be able to figure all of that stuff out within a week, which was their deadline that they had established, it was definitely a relief. I felt great after doing that.
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