My experience working with Copart IT

It’s been almost 4 years since I joined Copart as an Intern in the Middleware team. For newbies, Middleware was a core backend team that developed services for application front ends in G-stack countries (Germany, Spain, India). I loved the fast paced work environment. Under the leadership of Kasi Kikkisetti, I learned how to write my first API that went to production. I learned about the importance of inter team communication and other soft skills to do my work effectively. Middleware was a team that everyone craved to work for. My then manager, Sriram Vaidyanathan often used to reject new candidates to the team because they did not raise the bar than the average talent in the team. That ensured that work was always challenging (and hence fun).

This lasted for about a year and a half. Copart was growing. As with any organization that’s leading their respective industry, change was inevitable. Due to organizational restructuring, I worked on a lot of legacy code during the transition. Things that no longer work or should work the same without affecting the overall functionality. Architecturally we were moving away from Couchbase to Apache Solr, we were also revamping our G1 member site to a more robust G2 member web site. We were leaving behind legacy baggage like SAP and building our own back office which is a huge part of copart’s coin today. During a lot of these transition projects, my team lead was Mohan mallipedi who had significant influence on my career. While Kasi’s tutelage helped me understand the basics, Mohan’s modulus operandi was lead by example. He would be the experienced leader who got your back if you make mistakes but provides an opportunity to discover your own talents. A true gem among various team leads at Copart.

After the transition, Middleware team was divided into specialized teams who each focused on specific part of Copart’s business. Member, Seller, B2B, Yards, Data Services to name a few. Having worked and supported majority of the projects in member while at middleware, I was a natural fit for the G2 member team. Under Aditya Damaraju’s leadership, I had the opportunity to create a new division of G2 member called Member B2B focused towards customers with differing needs. I learned that like Amazon boxes, customers come in different sizes. For the average bidder, we had the G2 member site. But some of our customers that are big businesses who wanted the same functionality as the member website but as an API which they could use to give us more business programmatically. Excelling at this challenge required a new skill: Understanding how to speak to a customer. As someone who represented Copart to other companies, I quickly learned I was the developer building the API, I was the product analyst who understood requirements by speaking to buyers, I was the customer support after delivering the API to help them integrate our API. And finally I was the sales person who sold clients on API to help Copart maximize our returns on the API. This is where Aditya’s management skills come into picture.

I made life long friends while working at Copart. Our friendship often ran outside work into our personal lives. This picture should explain everything.

From each of my mentors within Copart, I learned a little of something. From Aditya, I learned about attention to detail, perfection, code quality and customer obsession. There are some advantages when you are in a team led by an Engineering Manager. For one thing, Aditya would point out edge cases in my thought process as an engineer on the team and do this compiler scan of the non existent code before it’s written. I would stand jaw-dropping at his talent. As manager of member team at Copart, Aditya was exceptional in understanding customer needs. Technical requirements would be driven by business needs but large part of those requirements were fine tuned, carved and compared to corresponding competitor features if any. At every point, Aditya would expect me to think on the programming constructs. All those efforts working with him paid off in May of 2019.

I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer at Copart. Copart had nurtured my talents and provided opportunities for me to grow. It was now my turn to develop new talent that will make future engineers. Fast forward to the end of 2019, I got an opportunity to work for Oracle OCI in Seattle. While I look forward to new avenues and opportunities in my professional career, no doubt that Copart had left a deep impact in my life. The friends I made along the way and the talented colleagues that I worked with are something I'll never forget. So here's a tearful good bye to those that relied on me, my work and my talent. Adios Amigos.