Meet Ankit Garg, Our July Confluent Champion

Tell us about your path to Confluent and what got you here. Tell us about your team and what role you play.

During my interview with Confluent, I got a sense of the really smart people that work here. I enjoyed all the interesting discussions around scalability and resilience. That’s interesting to me because the overall complexity of any software system is directly related to scalability and resilience. 

I always wanted to be part of a rocket ship where I can grow as the company grows —and being at Confluent seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I’m now working as a senior software engineer in the Audit Logs team. We are responsible for generating cloud audit logs from all internal services and sending the relevant data to customers for auditing purposes. 

This is a key security feature that we provide to our customers that contains all of the necessary information to follow a user’s interaction with your Confluent Cloud clusters and control plane. 

What made you interested in working here? What was the deciding factor?

One of my key interests was working on building a highly scalable software system. Most of the time when you join a big cloud company, things are already built up and are in maintenance mode. While reading about the highly scalable system, I was always fascinated by Kafka and how it handles a very massive workload with a very simple design. 

During the interview process with Confluent, all the interviewers were humble and collaborative. Throughout the entire process, all my conversations were clear, communicative, and insightful. That made me excited to join Confluent.

Can you give us an example of an interesting project that you are currently working on?

One of the projects that I am working on is to migrate static API keys to dynamic access tokens for our services. It is one of the key security compliance for audit services handling highly secure data.

We have built a highly secure vault accessible within the internal network region. Every service communicates via a private link to access a new token. On the vault side, we have multiple hosted engines which handle different request types and generate a new token. Once transmitted, these secrets are then mounted as K8S secrets and accessible within the containers. On the client side, the application handles the rotation and updates the existing connections. 

This kind of design removes the requirement of the cluster roll and allows us to rotate API keys seamlessly. 

What are some improvements you’re excited to see in the future?

I’d like to see Confluent continue to enhance the user experience and ease of use for the overall cloud product. There are already a lot of improvements in the works, such as providing a range of video tutorials or suggestions on every action. 

There’s still a lot of progress we can make—eventually, I’d love to see us make it possible for users to access and use a range of products from a single interaction. 

What does a typical day look like as a Confluent Senior Software Engineer?

I am based in Bengaluru, India, and start my day early. I tend to put focus time in the morning and usually have two to three meetings in the afternoon. I take a lot of PR reviews and a lot of ad-hoc meetings with co-workers for review and to give technical guidance. I spend some time addressing Slack queries from internal and technical support teams. 

As a Senior Software Engineer II, I take on a lot of ambiguous problems that require cross-team collaboration and impact the overall quality, customer experience, and security of our product. 

How would you describe Confluent’s company culture?

When I joined Confluent, the company was already public and there was a lot of focus on improving the overall resiliency, security, and scalability of the platform. This gives a lot of opportunities to think out of the box and grow.

A lot of time you are working on cross-collaborative features. This requires a lot of cross-team communication. Having a culture where everyone is helpful and responsive helps achieve these goals. 

One of the best perks of working at a remote-first company is that you save a lot of commute time and this has helped me have better work-life balance and take care of my family.