Vikram Shetty
Data Engineering (AWS) track →Before
Java Developer
TCS
After
AWS Data Engineer
Swiggy
Took
8 months
Vikram wrote Java for six years at a service company and wanted product-company data work. He learned Spark and the AWS data stack alongside his job, built three portfolio projects, and joined Swiggy as an AWS Data Engineer after eight months.
Where things stood
Six years of Java in a service company, mostly maintenance on someone else’s codebase. Vikram wanted product-company data work but had no distributed systems experience to show.
What changed
His Java background turned out to be an advantage once he had Spark on top of it. He built a streaming pipeline on Kinesis and an S3-to-Redshift batch layer, both with proper testing.
The interview run
Weekly mocks for two months. His coding rounds were never the problem — the data modelling rounds were, and that is where the mock feedback went.