What's your job about?
PEXA is an e-conveyancing platform that is transforming the property industry by digitising transactions and simplifying the settlement process. Throughout the graduate program I have had the opportunities to work in a variety of roles. In my first rotation I worked in the PEXA Key team. This is the team in charge of our mobile app that allows customers to track their settlement. In this team it was my responsibility to do manual testing the app in our development and production environments. This means that I would use load the app onto physical android and apple devices and ensure the app functions as intended. I was also responsible for gathering data and visualising it a report that could be shown to executives. The data was extracted from experiments we were running, backend performance of our app and most importantly user data which shows us how our customers are interacting with the app. In my second rotation I wanted to get more technical and thus joined the cloud engineering team. Here I learnt about DevOps and how to build applications and deploy them to a production environment. My first project was to build a webserver hosted in AWS cloud using an Infrastructure as a Code framework. This means I designed and built my system by defining it in templates and automating the provisioning of services that I required. For my third rotation I have joined the Quality Engineering team. Here I will be tasked with providing support in Low level development, automation scripting, DevOps and much more.
What's your background?
I am New Zealand born Indian who moved to Melbourne when I was 8 years old. Growing up I didn’t really know what I wanted to study or do in life. My parents suggested a should get a science degree as it would allow me to branch off it many different fields. In high school I didn’t put my best effort into studying and ended up getting a very average result. This was a disappointment for my parents as they expected better from me. This meant I chose a course (Computer Science) that was not my first preference. However, at university I found a real interest in the course and started to become passionate about cloud computing and all the cool things you could do with it. As part of my course, we were required to find a work placement. My university would often send out emails of Industry Based Learning (IBL) placements available to apply for. I applied to 4-5 and was able to secure a placement at NAB Bank. It was a 12-month program where I was placed in the Governance team of the Technology Architecture division. There I was involved in process improvement and reporting duties. After the program finished, I decided not to stay on at NAB and went back to university to finish my course. During my final year I started applying for graduate roles, applying at upwards of 30 companies. PEXA was my last application, and I was able to secure an offer. I have now been at PEXA for just over 12 months and am in the final rotation of the graduate program.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Definitely! Most of the skills I needed to do my job, I have picked up whilst I have been at PEXA. Having a background in technology helped me pick things up faster, but anyone can learn technical skills with some time and motivation to learn. I’ve found problem solving and willingness to learn play a big part in my role as well. Every project I’ve been involved in helped me learn a new skill, alongside using problem solving techniques to determine the best tools/processes/framework to complete my tasks.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
As I work in the technology team, I love learning about new and old tech. We have a fortnightly session in which someone volunteers to do a short demo on anything technology related. This can be non-PEXA related and allows for great discussions on how these things could potentially be applied at PEXA. When doing these interactive sessions involving something technical like programming, the feeling you get when something runs successfully is very satisfying. I think shows I really enjoy this field of work!
What are the limitations of your job?
Depending on the team there are varying levels of responsibility and expectation required of you. Some teams are much more demanding of your time and commitment. Some teams move faster than others as they require to keep up a timeline with other squads, whereas others have their own schedule of when they need to deliver. The only limitations of the job are the ones you set yourself. If you are not willing to learn and put in your best effort, you will be wasting the opportunities you are given. If you want to get into technical work, you will be required to learn at a quicker pace so that you can deliver.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...