5 Questions for Stitch Integrations Engineer, Pivendren Naik

Describe your job to a 10-year-old.

I’m part of the Stitch engineering team, and my job is to talk to banks through computers. Our system needs to interact with banks as the link between Stitch and our customers’ financial accounts. When customers want to pay for something using Stitch, we’ll take that instruction to the bank so that they can facilitate that transaction and make the payment happen.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I start my day looking at dashboards to gauge the overall health of our system and see how much activity users have generated on the Stitch platform. Next up, I have morning meetings that include stand-ups and syncs – these are all geared towards helping me ensure my team is set up to succeed for the day. After that, I jump into code.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever built?

WigWag. Before the Stitch team was building financial infrastructure for the continent, we first created a peer-to-peer payments app called WigWag – something we still use internally today, powered by Stitch on the backend.

Priyen Pillay, our Technical Onboarding Lead, had messaged me on LinkedIn and asked me if I wanted to work on this P2P payments app. I just wanted to build something cool, but Priyen and Kiaan had this whole vision.

The most exciting part for me is when you have an idea and you build it, and then pass it on to someone that uses it – and they think it’s cool. That’s awesome. I showed WigWag to everyone – my cousins, my friends, etc. I’d get everyone to send me money on WigWag.

With Stitch, I was really excited about giving businesses the ability to access user financial data. I’ve been using apps like 22seven for years, and it always frustrated me that I couldn’t access my financial data; ideally, everything is automated. It’s cool that we’re building the infrastructure for anyone to be able to do that – and to send and receive payments. I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of cool companies build with our solution, and I’m interested in what individuals will do with Stitch to solve their specific burning problems.

What’s the best thing about working at Stitch?

I had come from corporate working environments, which can be slow and mundane at times. But Stitch is super fast-paced and full of challenges.

I think the culture at Stitch is so amazing because everyone I work with is extremely intelligent, and I can bounce ideas off them and learn something new every day. We’ve fostered a healthy balance between work and play, and after hours, we engage in lots of social activities.

Why do you think Stitch is an exciting company for developers to work at?

The landscape is ever-changing, and you’ll never run out of a challenge. It’s exciting to use cutting-edge technology to tackle the problems we set out to solve, and we never box ourselves into using specific tools if there’s a newer or better way of doing something.