Starting my first SWE Job at Crédit Agricole CIB

How I ended up here

Unfortunately, I graduated. My previous experiences during my internship were with startups (Reluvate Technologies) and mid-sized companies (SP Group). To complete the cycle, I wanted to work in a large MNC that is tech-focused and belongs to the financial industry.

Why large?

1. I like to try new things.
2. I want to be exposed to large, complex applications, with concerns that otherwise would not exist, such as the need for high scalability, availability, security, and large-scale real-time data processing. Experience handling these non-functional requirements would be fun (and also improve my skills).
3. Large companies tend to have established processes for mentoring, training, and progression. I’m curious to see what that’s like.

Why tech-focused?

1. I want to be exposed to an environment with proper product/development processes, as well as an engineering culture that emphasizes best engineering practices.
2. I want to be surrounded by people in tech, this way I’ll probably end up learning more.
3. The less tech is treated as a cost-center and the more it contributes to the company’s bottom-line, the better the opportunities for an SWE like me to be part of something technically challenging, impactful, and isn’t a tech-debt nightmare, ergo the more I learn. I’ll probably be treated better too 🙏.

Why the financial industry?

1. Wherever I work, I’ll have to be part of an industry. As I work, I’ll be gaining domain knowledge. In my opinion, good financial literacy is extremely important. Why not gain domain knowledge in an industry which can be directly applicable to my daily life outside of work? This is also a reason I chose to specialize in Financial Technology in school.
2. My financial knowledge is poor and needs to improve. What better way to do so than by actually working in finance?
3. The financial services sector is a massive part of the world’s economy and moves a lot of money (what a surprise am I right?). Where there’s money there’s investment, including investment into tech. I work in tech, I enjoy being invested in 😎.

About the Company

Crédit Agricole is the 10th largest bank in the world and the 3rd largest in Europe by AUM. Their products and services include capital markets, wealth management, investment banking, structured financing, commercial banking and international trade.

Crédit Agricole CIB (CACIB) is the Corporate & Investment Banking arm of the Crédit Agricole Group. Globally, CACIB operates in over 30 countries, providing support for major corporations and institutional clients. It also leads in sustainable finance and green bonds. CACIB has 3 main IT hubs: Singapore, Paris, and London. Singapore is their second largest IT hub location, housing over 1400 people.

My Onboarding Experience

As part of the Crédit Agricole CIB Graduate “Propeller” Programme, I’m to undergo 12 weeks of training, consisting of 2 weeks of SWE fundamentals refresher training and 10 weeks of specialized on-the-job training in the team’s tech stack. The 2 weeks of refresher training includes Linux basics, Web basics (HTML, JS, CSS), a deep-dive into databases (SQL/PGSQL, MongoDB, data infrastructure technologies), Java programming (Spring, JPA, Servlets and JSP), Docker, Kubernetes, and Azure CI/CD.

My Project and Team

In an environment full of mature projects, somehow I have the opportunity to join a greenfield project that aims to reinvent how data is transported, processed, and distributed from upstream sources, such as Financing, Capital Markets, and others. The goal is to serve as the single-source of truth for data needed by downstream Finance and Risk processes. When I joined, the team has just exited the POC stage and started their first sprint.

Technologies I would be touching include:

• Core Java
• Spring Boot
• Apache Spark
• Apache Kafka
• Apache Iceberg
• Angular
• Docker & Kubernetes
• SQL
• GitLab

This is quite different from the technologies that I’m used to working with (I mostly did web development during my internships). Luckily enough, I joined a team full of nice people, with a diverse background in Core Java, large-scale data processing, data engineering, and CI/CD. I’m excited to learn from them 🙂.

Moving Forward

Moving forward, I will be documenting what I learned on the job here, most likely on a sprint-by-sprint basis (biweekly). I’ll also probably be documenting cheat sheets of the technologies/concepts that I’ll be working with, mostly just so I have a place hosted online to refer back to for stuff.