First real job: testing software that moves actual money at one of India’s largest public-sector banks, inside a 20-member team.

I wrote automated Java test scripts for the interest-rate calculation modules, which cut the manual testing effort by about 40%. On the backend side, I worked on database partitioning and load balancing that sped up the mobile-banking flows by roughly 35%.

Banking software is unglamorous and unforgiving, which makes it a good first teacher. A bug here is not a broken animation. It is someone’s savings account showing the wrong number.