Employee Spotlight: Arpit Kushwaha, Ultimate Team Player

Since our early days as Hasura, we’ve indexed for hiring people who are driven to keep learning, keep improving, and never say, that’s not in my job description. After all, we know that real growth often happens outside the lines, and careers don’t always follow a linear path.

But what does that actually look like in practice? I sat down with Arpit Kushwaha—who started his career as a Community Management intern many years ago and now works as a Business Systems Support Specialist—to find out more about his unique career path and the things he’s learned along the way.

You had an interesting journey to joining PromptQL (then Hasura). Can you tell me a bit about that?

I was doing my bachelors, and a friend of mine mentioned the Intro to Modern Application Development (IMAD) course Tanmai [Gopal] was teaching online. Tanmai has something when he talks and teaches—you really understand. It got me excited. The course was teaching people how to build and deploy their own web app using HTML, CSS, JS and NodeJS, and many of the people had never used computers before. Information that was basic for a software engineer like me wasn’t basic for them. There was a forum for official questions, and since I knew the answers, I began responding. It kept happening, so everyone just assumed I was from the team.

I was so active that Tanmai reached out and offered me an internship. I joined as a moderator for the second iteration of the course while I was in college. After college, I was offered an in-person internship in Bangalore running the whole show.

Over the 3 iterations of IMAD, about 150,000 students from India took the course. A lot of former students still reach out to me to tell me about the internships and jobs they got because of it. I love hearing their success stories.

What kind of work were you doing after IMAD ended?

I became the tech person on a newly formed marketing team. I started recording demos and putting them online. I also started reaching out to folks and raising awareness and building community around Kubernetes, including leading recurring Koffee with Kubernetes chats in Bangalore.

Then you organized the first GraphQL Asia conference. How was that experience?

I got asked to work on that. I had no idea how to do events but said, sure, let’s do it! I started visiting hotels and figuring things out on the fly with Rajoshi (Ghosh, co-founder of PromptQL), and Harsha, the marketing manager. About 150 people came, and it was a big success. The following year, we did a second edition, bigger and better. About 380 people came to that one, and I walked 14 km in one day within the venue!

GraphQL Asia is one of the accomplishments I’m most proud of. It was very important to raise awareness of GraphQL and show everyone how awesome it is, and I feel GraphQL Asia contributed significantly in this respect.

You ended up moving onto the People Team. What led to that?

At the time, the team was just Sushma Bhaskar, our Sr. People Partner, doing everything, and it had reached the point where she needed help implementing systems and automating workflows. I helped launch the application tracking system, careers page, our service desk, and human resource information system. Sushma and I also planned our first offsite outside of India in 2022. Much like GraphQL Asia, we figured it out as we went, and it was great. Based on all of our learnings, we also began hosting events at our Bangalore office for no charge as a way of giving back to the community.

In this role, I realized I was really good at connecting stuff and began doing that across the org. Eventually, realizing my scope was limited, my manager suggested I move onto the IT team, where I could work across the full company.

What kind of work are you doing now as the Business Systems Support Specialist on the Platform Team?

It’s kind of an IT admin role. I get to roll out and optimize all the tools and systems we use and make things easier for other teams, while cutting down costs and running things more efficiently. I am the first person that folks reach out to when they run into issues, and I get a lot of joy from helping them troubleshoot and get up and running again. I also work closely with our Security team to enhance our security posture as a company especially with some of our IT related policies such as access management, MDM, DLP, etc.

You’ve worked on a lot of different teams in your career till now. Were there any roles or teams that really surprised you once you saw the inner workings?

The People Team. It’s not technical, so I thought it would be really easy. But I found out it’s mountains of work, and if there isn’t anyone technical to help optimize it, it all has to be done manually. It’s what drove me to optimize processes on a daily basis, and I’m glad to have got the opportunity to set up the base framework and automations that cuts down a lot of manual effort. I also noticed it’s the team least likely to get publicly recognized for the work they do.

Having gained such a wide breadth of experience, at this point are you looking to continue on the path of variety or have you found a place to land and go deep in one function?

I want to expand in the role I’m in now on the IT team. I get to help the whole company. I really like to fix things. That’s what got me started in the first place. I was just trying to help people. Simplifying things for non-technical people feels amazing. I love when people come up to me with questions, and I can help them out. That’s the opportunity I’ve gotten here always, no matter my role, across the board.

If you also believe real growth happens outside the lines, this might be the place for you! Check out our open roles here.