Myer Employee Perspectives: Sudipto Sengupta

Recently our National Talent Acquisition Manager Karen Werner sat down with Lead Enterprise Architect Sudipto Sengupta, to talk through his amazing career to date within the Myer IT division. Read their inspiring chat below!

KW: Sudipto, you have recently celebrated 10 years working with Myer. Congratulations! Tell me how you came to work for Myer.

SS: Yes I have worked for Myer for just over 10 years now but what you probably don’t realise is that my journey with Myer started before that when I was working as a Consultant and contracted to Myer through SAP. I was captivated by the people who worked for Myer and during what was my first work experience in Australia, for me the people and the culture really encapsulated the true “Aussie mateship” that I had always heard so much about.

When I was approached to come and work directly with the Company, it was an easy yes for me. In 2012, when I joined Myer as an Applications Architect, I was only the 2nd person to be ever sponsored by the Company for the Visa category I was on.

KW: So, you must have seen some change in your time with Myer, not only with the business but also in the tech space. How would you summarise some of the opportunities you’ve been able to get involved with over the years?

SS: When I joined, it was an interesting time to be a subject matter expert in the POS, online and EFT payments space. This was a growing area and online purchasing was steadily on the rise. In 2015, I worked on a multi-million dollar process and systems transformation initiatives and I was promoted to Solutions Architect, creating governance and strategically aligning Myer's modern and legacy IT systems. Off the back of this transformation, it wasn’t long until our journey into the cloud commenced and with this expansion, came a lot of learning over a two-year period but really brought all of the change together and modernised our ways of working.

Since this transformation, I have been promoted another two times. Once as the Domain Architect and now, I am fortunate to be leading a team of 6 architects as the Lead Enterprise Architect. I have always been open to any opportunities to work on new projects within Myer, develop strategy to meet business goals and my love of always wanting to learn and fix problems has meant that I have been able to make things better for Myer along the way.

KW: In many ways, it seems as though you have grown and transformed with Myer, how does that feel??

SS: I feel incredibly lucky! Myer is an employer that listens to everyone’s ideas and those who put their hand up wanting exposure to different areas, will get the learning they crave. It has been great to be a part of the strong growth online. I have also seen the business change their ways of working, not only from a tech perspective during COVID, but our support office employees, including my team working remotely.

KW: I am glad you mentioned COVID as I would love to understand the impact this has had, and continues to have on your team.?

SS: Honestly, it may sound strange but COVID and the new ways of working have seen us as a team become more collaborative. We have become more agile as a team and stakeholders, perhaps pushed out of their comfort zone, have become more open. With a more collaborative approach, we lost the need for having one architect for one project and this meant more people exposed to different work and a greater level of solution design across multiple domains. We have also seen a drop in project time with an increased level of collaboration and productivity. We were once writing road maps for 5 years, we are now planning similar work in 3 year road maps.

The team have a different mindset; we are enjoying a flatter structure. I don’t see us ever going back to the old ways of working!

KW: Now, on a personal note, you’re a Husband and a Dad to two young children. How do you manage the demands of work and family life?

This has definitely been one of the up-sides to COVID. In my Indian culture, we operate in a joint family system. It is very important to us that our children grow up with a strong cultural imprint and so with our first child, in a pre-covid world we were able to have them spend two months with grandparents to experience our native country and immerse in the language. Not only does this provide a good sense of the family tree, but helps working parents focus on their occupations.

With our second child, we were unable to do this due to the pandemic. Without the very progressive ways of working that Myer have instilled, getting on with the job and juggling two children would have been bit difficult, if not impossible.

?At Myer we are given the empowerment, flexibility of how and where we work in collaboration with managers and team.

There is a huge amount of respect afforded to us as employees that we all have lives outside of work, coupled with an underlying trust that we will continue to do our best work.

KW: Should people in the technology space consider Myer as a great place to work if they are looking for career advancement? Why?

SS: Absolutely! If I worked for an IT Company, I would be working on one domain only. Here at Myer, we are a one stop, IT shop! It gives me so much job satisfaction to experience a variety of work across multiple domains. It?has been an interesting journey continuing to ?modernise legacy systems, embedding agile in architecture and engineering practices, the continued drive towards multi-cloud adoption and automation. There is still so much more we want to do and for those who are looking for a genuine opportunity and are ready to grow and learn, there is a world of potential here and waiting!