Ascendion and I
Meet Kanimozhi Rangaswamy, a senior data engineer, who has been with Ascendion for the last one year. Kanimozhi means ‘lovable’ and according to her teammates, lovable she is, given her love for her family, for nature, her pets, her work and her unassuming leadership qualities.
Kanimozhi has always been a school topper. After finishing her higher secondary schooling, she finished her engineering in Electronics and Communication from Anna University, Coimbatore, as a gold medallist in 2011.
Earlier, during her spare time she used to read a lot, but with her two sons around now, she is busy taking care of her home and putting in the hard hours at work. Though she does catch movies that come with a good review from time to time with her husband, who is a die-hard Ajith fan. She is thankful to her father, who was her backbone in everything, especially in her career path without whom she might not have been able to pursue her career all these years.
Kani, as she is fondly called, is a foodie. She simply loves mutton biryani. It’s her weak spot. But her sons say that she makes the best mutton biryani, better than any restaurant in the world. Every Sunday that mutton biryani is made in the house, there is a buzz going around that she is making mutton biryani, and it suddenly becomes a ‘Sunday Special.’
My decision to pursue engineering and make a mark in the tech domain was inspired by my sister. My sister had designed a speed levelling system for one of UK’s luxury car brands and naturally I wanted to follow her footsteps and do something similar. However, life had different plans, and I was selected by a software giant during the campus placements where I started my career working in the banking domain.
My next few stints were also with tech giants as a Java developer. During these years, I spent a significant amount of time learning and upgrading to big data and Cloud technologies like Hive, Hadoop, Python and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It was about at this time that I was referred by an ex-colleague to Ascendion. I liked Ascendion’s approach and their growth plans as an upcoming company and decided that I wanted to grow with it. And with that the decision was made.
I joined Ascendion as a Lead Engineer. During my initial days, I got an opportunity to refresh my knowledge on Google Cloud services technologies like Cloud Composer, Dataproc, Dataflow and BigQuery along with Azure Databricks and PySpark. This was a blessing, as I could use this knowledge immediately in my next project which was with a major Healthcare services provider. The Healthcare major wanted to move its existing data from Hive to BigQuery in GCP. The migration was automated with Infoworks, with fewer resources and at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches. During the project, my team and I got to try our hands on Infoworks and learnt the entire Infoworks implementation on our own.
I also got to lead a team of 3 members for an internal codeathon where we built pipelines from cloud storage to insert data in BigQuery. In the process, my team and I gained knowledge on composer and Airflow end to end. The cherry on the cake is that the learnings from this codeathon project are planned to be implemented in an upcoming project.
It was actually an e-mail. Our hours of analyzing data, working on different tech stacks, pushing my team proving to everyone that we can achieve whatever we set our sights on, had paid off. We had successfully migrated our 1st application and we had received an email stating the same. The stakes were very high as we had managed to move this project from a big multinational company to Ascendion. That one email made me feel like a Gold-Medal winner all over again.
It’s only been a year but feels a lot more than that. That’s how comfortable and wanted Ascendion has made me feel. As a woman it has allowed me to pursue and strike a perfect balance between my personal and professional life. On the home front my family is well looked after and on the professional front I am surrounded with new technology, new ways of doing things, know what is happening in cutting edge technology, and being assured that with an atmosphere like this, I will always be one up over the rest of my peers who master only one thing. At Ascendion, Ideas are always welcomed, and you are given the freedom to make decisions. My mentor has been instrumental in pushing me to learn new technologies like generative AI. It doesn’t stop here; we have also been given a free hand to think of possible use cases around generative AI and use it in our day-to-day work.
My message to future Ascendion joiners would be that over here we have the privilege to bring forth our ideas and work on cutting-edge technology stacks. We are a growing company, so we are not afraid to experiment and try out new things. In fact, we are encouraged to do it. Thinking out of the box, learning every day and having a penchant for relentless curiosity is what drives us. And I am sure it will drive you too. So, come on board quickly, this is one bus you don’t want to miss!
