Q&A with Le Kang: Transitioning from Academia to Industry

In this quickfire Q&A, Le Kang describes his journey from PhD candidacy to Software, and then full stack engineering at Lendi. Le details the skills he acquired during studies and how they have translated to his work at Lendi and helped overcome the challenges associated with platform development. Le also talks about some of the industry-leading technologies he uses at Lendi and why he joined the company.

1. Hi Le, tell us about yourself?

I am a software engineer for Lendi’s Funnell team, a platform engineering team. I mainly work on frontend, but recently started to pick up backend tickets. So I am progressively transforming myself to a full stack developer.

Prior to Lendi, I was a PhD candidate in the Faculty of IT and Engineering at UTS. I had been working on my PhD for almost 2 years until the pandemic hit and both of my supervisors left the university. After some discussions with my family and ex-supervisors, I decided to pause my PhD study and started to look for a full-time software engineer position.

Lendi is one of the few companies that valued my academic background over my industry experience. After a final interview with some other key members in the Funnel team, I was sure this was the team I wanted to work with. I had no hesitation accepting the offer!

2. Can you tell us about some of the skills and knowledge you acquired from your studies and how they have helped in your role at Lendi?

The academic skills I acquired during my PhD candidacy have helped me a lot with my role at Lendi. For example, research, reading and critical thinking are fundamental. After I gather information on a task or issue, I also need to review, analyse and interpret them. Thinking critically about each piece of information from a different perspective is the key in forming an effective solution.

At Lendi, good documentation and communication make your ideas easily accessible, helps your peers learn solutions quickly, and more importantly, cuts product maintenance costs in the future.

3. What accomplishment or project are you most proud of since joining the Lendi team?

My first task after joining the Funnel team was challenging. Thanks to my Team Leads trust, I was asked to restructure our front-end codebase. After a month of work, I successfully split our packages in a finer granularity. Replacing the deprecated tslint with eslint for code linting improving the efficiency of the pipeline build. It was a great opportunity for me to see the bigger picture.

4. Have you started working with a new technology since joining Lendi? If so, what is it and what is exciting about it?

When I joined Lendi, I started to work with CI/CD. This is crucial for software development as it automates the key steps of software releasing. Ensuring it is robust and efficient certainly benefits the team and the company. During my time at Lendi we've successfully made our Funnel front-end pipeline 3 times faster.

I also like the analytics tools that Lendi provides to us, Datadog, Snowflake and Fullstory. These tools help us investigate issues easily and efficiently from different perspectives.

5. What do you enjoy most about working at Lendi?

I would have to say the team culture, the flexible working environment and ongoing development. I also love using different technologies to ensure the user experience is as seamless as possible, while also protecting our customers' privacy. In my time here, I’ve had the opportunity to work with cutting edge technologies spanning from frontend, backend to the platform infrastructure. Some I can think of are k18s, micro services, data warehousing, kafka, AWS lambda and CD/CI, etc. It's exciting having the opportunity to access, observe and master them in one company.

Lendi is hiring!

We're always on the lookout for passionate, motivated individuals who are excited about innovation and ongoing learning. If you're looking for a new opportunity check out our open roles and company page to find out more.