The Long Road from a Job to a Career

Landing my dream job at Luno has to be one of the most significant moments in my life and career. I’d say it’s one moment I finally saw myself able to make engineering a career, more than just a job.

But that’s how it is right now. The happy ending, the conclusion of the journey.?

Now we’re gonna take a short trip down memory lane.?

This kicks off in 2018, nearing the end of the year and my career as a student. I found myself having to ensure I’d be a working professional in the following year which wasn’t guaranteed at the time. At this point, Luno was another “pretty great tech company”. They had an app with great reviews. An app so geniously simplistic that friends who hadn’t traded before were casually moving money around the markets with the grace and ease of sending out a tweet.

I’d sent my CV and landed an interview for an engineering grad role. How hard could it be, right? My interview day began a very long road toward finally joining Luno. Suffice it to say, I didn’t prepare for the interview and underestimated the company; a sin that karma felt was worth punishing. They covered it all: Binary trees, Time-space Complexity, Big Os, mathematics. Yeah, these were the big leagues, alright.

The bar was insanely high and I really wanted in on the company. I needed to better myself somehow. I had to be the best. I decided to ‘science it up’ for the next year, getting down and dirty in learning all I could about compilers. If I was gonna be computer-science ready, this was how. Fast forward to 2020, about a year or two later, and two more failed attempts at scoring that Luno interview (a Lunoview?). I started to show real progress. My skills began to attract the eyes of others on the global stage. I’d gotten a peek behind the curtain. It was just the prep I needed. This time Luno would notice me.

The year is 2021, I ramped up my LeetCode training. I worked on compilers in the evenings and practiced LeetCode on weekends. A recruiter gave me valuable advice to build my online presence. Enter the GoVirtualFilesystem project. A full-blown filesystem in Go (Luno’s home language) and I’d publish code for it once a week with a blog post. It would go live on Reddit and I’d respond to the critiques. And that’s the push my life needed. The message of a lifetime had finally come from Luno after I’d started posting on my blog.?

I was ready this time. I drilled LeetCode, I mock-interviewed with friends. The interview day came. I did not instinctively know it went well. No, I was cautioned against gut feelings. And then it happened. A call came from Tazmin, my recruiter. I couldn’t keep my mind from not drifting during our call, preparing for what had gone wrong.

Except, I’d done it. I was a Lunaut after three years of trying and failing!

As I write this, I’m reminiscing on how each failure felt like the end and how incomprehensible that was. I’m happy to say that joining Luno has been the best decision of my entire career, possibly my entire life. It's one thing to be part of a company with the best and brightest people I’ve ever met. It’s another to have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with the beginning of a technology that will change society.

If you’ve tried and failed and tried again at Luno like I have, always remember; they can say no an infinite amount of times. They only have to say yes once.