Humans of Helix: Riddhi Pandit

Meet Riddhi Pandit

Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Managing and leveraging data is fundamental to launching and sustaining embedded finance programs at scale — Helix’s bread and butter. Because Helix operates its own cloud-native core, we keep track of all the financial information for millions of users ourselves. Managing this information takes a keen mind, a mind for the future, a mind for scale, because as our technology must handle more and more data, it becomes more prone to error. So we wrangle these increasing demands with even more technology. That’s Riddhi Pandit’s job — she creates systems for maintaining our growing databases, and she does it quite well.

After joining Helix in 2016, Riddhi was promoted multiple times to the point where she is now, which is running all of Helix’s databases. In her world, the name of the game is automation. The financial products that our clients build must access our databases constantly, and sometimes there are disruptions. If a disruption happens, Riddhi’s robot takes care of the problem. She built an automated system that identifies and fixes database errors. It resolves the disruption and sends a notification explaining what happened. This saves the team from having to spend extra time fixing issues manually.

Ultimately, the goal is to find errors and correct them before the user discovers them.

Riddhi has been working in database tools for 15 years, and she’s progressed from being on the developer side, writing the code, to an administrator, where she helps developers fix their mistakes and scale their systems better. But before entering the database world, Riddhi wanted to be a doctor. She had a dream of healing people. Although life took her down a different path, she still gets the feeling that she’s healing others when she fixes problems that directly impact the user experience.

As a competitive person, Riddhi believes that every problem has a solution. You should never think of a problem as “tough” — you simply haven’t spent enough time thinking it through. And her long line of accomplishments suggests she’s onto something. In fact, it’s her depth and breadth of experience that she brings to the team that makes her truly valuable to Helix. Because she’s worked with so many different systems, she knows how to scale any system, and she’s been the driver behind many changes and improvements within the organization.

Originally, Riddhi’s mother inspired her and her father supported her in her efforts to achieve. Coming from modest means in India, her parents dreamed that their children would move to the USA and live a better life than they did. People laughed, because at the time, many people in India didn’t believe it was important for girls to be educated. But Riddhi’s parents continued to push for her and her siblings to pursue success, and that drive paid off. All three daughters in Riddhi’s family became engineers, and her brother became a doctor.

For those new to Helix, Riddhi suggests letting passion for your work run wild. There will always be challenges, because Helix is growing quickly, so be prepared for them and keep your attitude focused on never giving up. If you can do that, the company will help you thrive. One of the aspects of Helix that stands out to Riddhi is the dedication of the leadership team. She’s witnessed countless occasions where a leader has gone out of his or her way to help a team member, including herself, and she’s eternally grateful for the opportunity she’s been given.

Outside of work, Riddhi enjoys singing Indian songs and cooking. It’s her meditation. She’s also a proud mother and enjoys cheering for her eight-year-old son during his tennis matches. Although these moments can be challenging to make time for, Riddhi works hard to “turn off” occasionally and enjoy herself. Given the opportunity, she would like to go to Hawaii, sit on a beach, read a nice book, and just relax.