# Chapter 8: Interlude — A Week in a Fintech Engineering Team

> From *The Confident Learner: Tech and Domain Fundamentals for the AI Era* by Dharanova Pioneer, a free online book.
> Web page: https://elephantbamboo.com/chapters/8 · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

**What this chapter covers:** An interlude: one week, day by day, inside a fintech engineering team, with the fundamentals of Part A at work.

*The opening of the chapter follows. The full chapter is free to read with a Google sign-in at the web page above.*

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This chapter is different.

For seven chapters, this book has been teaching. Now, for one chapter, it stops teaching and just shows. The fundamentals you have just learned do not live in textbooks. They live in the rhythm of real teams doing real work. The point of this chapter is to let you see that rhythm. There are no sections to work through. No build-read-ask ritual at the end. Just one week, told straight through, in a company you can imagine yourself joining. Read it the way you would read a long story by someone you trust. Most of what is in here you will recognise. Some of what is in here you will meet again, properly, in later chapters. The interlude is the bridge between what you have learned and the place where it gets used.

The company is a fintech startup in Bangalore. Three years old, about forty engineers. The product is a payments aggregator — small merchants use the company's APIs to accept UPI, cards, and net banking from their customers. The merchants are the customers. The merchants' customers are the users. The company sits between them, processing about eight million rupees of transaction volume on a good day and taking a small fee on each.

The engineering team in this story is six people.

*Moin* is the senior backend engineer. Four years out of college, the team's de facto tech lead though without the title. He is the person who asks the question nobody else thought of. He drinks his coffee black and at room temperature, which the team has accepted as one of his eccentricities.