Joining Tokopedia as a Fresh Graduate Software Engineer

What is Tokopedia?

If you do not live in Indonesia, you probably wouldn’t know what Tokopedia is. Tokopedia is the biggest online marketplace in Indonesia with 90 million monthly active users (source in Bahasa, 2019).

For Software Engineer readers, in Tokopedia we mainly use but not limited to these stacks: Golang, PostgreSQL, Redis, NSQ, and React.js.

Applying and being Interviewed

I applied as a Software Engineer at Tokopedia through my campus visit’s recruitment process, the process was quick and professional. I went through these steps below.

• Online Test — HackerRank, 4 Questions.
• 1st Interview — Algorithm & Data Structure.
• 2nd Interview — Data Structure & SQL Queries.
• 3rd Interview — Past Experiences, Side Projects, Soft Skill related questions, etc.
• HR Interview.
• Offering.

I went through 6 steps of interviews with the first one was a simple Online Test using HackerRank. The first, second, and third interview was conducted onsite at Tokopedia Tower. Then, if you’ve reached the HR interview it usually means that you have passed all the tests and the HR will inform you of the administrative requirements and the offering process. Save the best for the last, it’s the offering process, it is conducted via email, but if you have any questions or a counteroffer, you can call the payroll team’s phone number as provided in the email.

Probation

Fast forward to August, I joined Tokopedia and we conduct the onboarding process. I got placed into the Official Store Merchant team initially. The probation process was briefed shortly the moment after I introduce myself to the team, the process is divided in months, where the first month I received mostly a simple introduction task and getting to know the Tokopedia development cycle better. The next month I will receive a gradual increase in the task difficulty.

The first month's probation period was relatively easy, I was given a few simple introduction tasks. The second month, was where things are getting interesting, because coincidentally, Tokopedia underwent a huge reorganization. This reorganization assigned me into a whole different team than I was in (although temporarily still under the same Tech Lead), I joined the Open Platform team also known as Open API. This month, we were mostly migrating our code from our old repository to the new one, specifically for the Open API team.

The third month, after we as a team finished moving the code from the old repository into the new one, we still hadn’t used it in production, because the code in the new repository was not hosted anywhere. And so I volunteered this “instance migration” task, this task is to provide an instance to host our new code in. This task was originally our Senior Software Engineer’s task, but since I was intrigued, and I saw that our Senior was a little bit overwhelmed with tasks, I asked him whether I could take the task, he agreed.

So working on this task, I read a lot of documentation from our DevOps team, and I also read a lot of how Ubuntu upstart works, since Tokopedia was still using Ubuntu 14.04 at the time. I finished the task on time without any problem, which I consider as an achievement as a fresh graduate.

Other than this task, our team is also implementing Clean Architecture, which I, fortunately, had past experience with during my part-time in Nodeflux. I contributed a lot to how our team will implement the architecture, with a lot of meaningful discussion with our Engineering Manager and Principal Engineer.

End of the last month, finally it’s the probation review time for me. I attended a 1-on-1 session with my then Tech Lead (currently Engineering Manager), my probation performance was reviewed and I was told that I have exceeded his expectations. And after this moment that I received the permanent Tokopedia ID Card, with my photo on it.

Thank you for reading my joining the Tokopedia process. Check my other story out if you are wondering what my team is working on, or if you simply interested in Tokopedia Open Platform. https://owenyuwono.medium.com/tokopedia-open-platform-and-how-to-use-it-dcede943c3ae