Worldfirst UK, London

As a Senior Software Engineer, I was entrusted with maintaining and improving legacy projects, training other engineers to develop high-quality software, developing cutting-edge new projects, and supporting other teams working on projects in which I have expertise.

Technologies
- React
- GraphQL (Apollo)
- Symfony
- Zend Framework
- REST APIs
- MySQL
- Jenkins, Docker, Bamboo
- Testing
  - Jest, Cypress
  - PHPSpec, PHPUnit, JUnit
- Java SpringBoot

"Priya is very friendly and a great team player. She has been involved in many critical projects and her contribution along with the team is crucial for the success of the project.

Her friendly nature brings the team closer and enables a fun working environment.

Priya embraces new team and project with high spirit and for anyone looking for a great team player, she is highly recommended."

"Priya might possibly be the most reliable team player I’ve ever worked with.

I had the pleasure to be her manager at WorldFirst

She’s a motivated, efficient and capable engineer who becomes the goto person for every project she gets involved with due to her fast learning ability, work ethic and approachability.

She always had a very positive attitude that was incredibly inspiring to everyone around her.

I have no doubt Priya will grow to achieve great things on her career. Any employee would be lucky to have her on their team and I hope one day we’ll get to work together again."

"I've had the pleasure of working with Priya and it has been refreshing to work with someone as dedicated and collaborative as Priya is.

She always makes herself available to solve problems, coach team members and to look at ways that we can improve our ways of working.

She is insightful, dedicated and goes above and beyond to ensure that we are always delivering to the highest quality possible.

Priya really brings the team together and her passion makes sure everyone comes on the journey together."

Worldfirst Journey

1688 - Offshore Alipay Wallet Payment

The initiative

When Worldfirst got acquired by Ant Group, to maximise opportunities for Chinese users, we wanted to integrate Alipay Platform with our WorldFirst Online (WFO) platform.

With this, we would able to allow users to pay to their Alipay wallet from WFO world account

How did we achieve it?

The main target was to significantly improve the cross-border experience for merchants, whilst further cementing our status as the best platform for international trade.
This is high level diagram for 1688 architecture. I contributed on “Link Alipay Wallet”, “Get quote for wallet”, and “Book a deal for wallet”.
For “Link a Wallet”, I contributed to highly efficient “Alipay Wallet micro-service”

I suggested this microservice’s architecture based on interface pattern where I insisted on clear design strategy in which classes are structured in a way where dependencies are not hidden and easily swappable, and I came-up with this skeletal sketch.
It had clean separation of Microservice from WFO legacy code
This extendable and de-coupled architecture led us to high testability.
It was developed with extensibility in mind, and that is why, Onshore wallet team was able to extend this service without any difficulties.
This initiative touched many parts of our legacy systems such as WFO, BackOffice, and Transfer Service.

We had a lot of knowledge gaps in a 14 year old codebase.
I went to different teams, started with pen and paper and later put together a lot information into an architecture document to help design the whole initiative.
I took initiative and analysed & documented complete data flow for WFO cross deals
When I dissected whole journey for current cross deals, we were clear about how WFO and Transfer service is going to be behaving for Ledger to Wallet flow, and it also helped to understand how transfer service interacts with BackOffice, and we knew exactly how to integrate AWS SQS queue.
So, because of my analysis and planning skills, the path that everyone expected to be most complex, it became most interesting and easy to work with.
I later shared this analysis with on-shore wallet team and it was very helpful for them to understand transfer service behaviour.
Later, I contributed to design and develop Ledger To Wallet flow in Transfer Service.
As a last part of this journey, we implemented Wallet Payment Instruction SQS Queue on AWS for PaymentInstructionService service to use.

Learnings

Challenges:

Knowledge base
Designing architecture with a 14 year old codebase

Learnings:

Communication with Ant Collegues
Keeping tabs on the direction of the objective
Clean and extensible architecture

Outcome:

Customer Focused: No incidents!
Most successful project in Worldfirst's history: We predicted 900million RMB revenue, but this project made company earn 1.4bn RMB as of 31st December 2019
We won most prestigious award of Ant Group called "Super Ma"

Re-design and China Re-branding

What was the goal?

Improve tightly coupled design system
Re-branding for China market
Better user experience site wide

How did we achieve it?

The main target was to improve old design which had poor user experience, not visually appealing , outdated and not easy to scan.
The other target was, to do the re-branding for china market that provides better user experience.
With this initiative, my main contributions were:
- I worked closely with UX people and planned workflow with product and team
- I developed core components of the system - Improved legacy skin and templating, to allow assets, to work based on localization
- I contributed towards re-designing WFO-layout and refactored old WFO layout-class and components
Because of all these efforts, again, we delivered this initiative with no incidents

Learnings

Challenges:

WFO as a legacy system

Learnings:

Dealing with legacy systems and templating
Planning with product and design stakeholders
Keeping it simple and stupid

Outcome:

Customer Focused:
- Modern look with strong branding
- Improved user experience
WFO which was a 14 year old codebase, became very adaptive, which was proven to be a solid foundation for 1688 project.

Win China: CNY payment journey enhancements

What was the goal?

To create and improve document upload for this journey
To add beneficiary triggers for CNY currency in the WFO payment journey
To create a new email channel for CNY document confirmation for dealers and accomodate client comms for this process.

How did we achieve this?

When we started this initiative, people knew theoretical path, but what happens internally, behind the scenes in WFO, was kind of mystery.
I was able to unravel this mystery by following the trail and by analysing existing document upload storage flow and compliance aspects at the initial phase.
In this process, we were able to highlight some key issues like, WFO uploads were happening 3 different times. WFO uploads to itself, a cron job will run and upload it to BackOffice(BO), and BO will upload it to external file store.
Because of my initiative to analyse this process, document upload process is no longer a mystery to developers.
In the 2nd phase, I developed some core components for this journey
During this initiative as well, I did extensive testing to lead this initiative to success.

Learnings

Challenges:

Knowledge base
Dealt with constant changing requirements

Learnings:

Design perspective
Negotiating
Product Observability
Stakeholder communication/Written communication

Outcome:

Customer obsessed:
- 9000+ users were using this feature seamlessly
- CNY payment journey was improved
- No incidents at all! (which was very much expected as it was very old tightly coupled codebase)

Win China: New payments journey and new currency account dashboard

What was the goal?

As continued efforts to "Win China" battle, I was pulled for "New payments journey" and "New currency account dashboard" initiatives.
Main target for these initiative were
- to improve user experience for payments journey and currency account dashboard
- to provide better experience for Chinese E-commerce users to start with

How did we achieve this?

To achieve this,

I designed, developed and maintained React components for these Journeys.
I contributed to write APIs with Apollo GraphQL
I also helped to maintain Java Spring Boot Currency Account Service
The output was satisfying to see
- overall customer experience with currency account dashboard was improved
- CHZ customer payment journey became smoother and helped for revenue generation

World Account: Single Product

What was the goal?

Another key project that I am very proud of to contribute, was "World Account Single Product".

In order to deliver maximum value to customers, we planned to consolidate all our features into one product offering.

This means, to provide a single World Account experience, we needed to merge E-commerce and Corporate permission flows in WFO.

How did we achieve this?

Because of my contributions to the successful design and development in earlier projects, I was invited to join the team.

I reviewed entire WFO data flow model to discover points where permissions are read and implemented ;

reason why we did that , was to swap from Zend permissions model with our new ability service.

Learnings

Challenges:

Legacy WFO - Big bang changes
High risk project analysis

Learnings:

Ability pattern experiment

Outcome:

We released this initiative for 1 user to start with, then increased the user base at the later stage as it was proven successful.
It prepared basic block for upcoming Single Product with IPAY