Behind The Blockchain: an interview with Anirban Mukherjee, Senior Engineering Manager at Nuri

During this interview Anirban was kind enough to share his career journey so far and the skills he's learned along the way which enabled him to reach his current career point. Anirban talked through his thoughts on Web3 and what he believes the future holds for this version of the internet - hopefully this post is inspiring and helpful to anyone looking to make a career for themselves in Web3.

So, let's get into it...

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Jack "For people who do not know who you are, could you introduce yourself?"

Anirban "My name is Anirban Mukherjee, a Senior Engineering Manager working in the Cryptocurrency and FinTech sector. I live in Germany, love building products and also writing code whenever I get the time for it."

Jack "Talk us through your career journey so far"

Anirban "I wrote my first code when I was 10years old, and it has been a passion ever since. Even today I spend a good amount of time building apps and side-projects whenever I get the time for it. I started my career about 14 years back, spending the first 10yrs in the telecommunications industry delivering hyper-scale internet routing platforms for companies like Verizon, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, etc. In 2019, I joined my first startup where I, along with the CTO, built up the entire engineering chapter, to end up building a revolutionary new smartphone with an entirely AI-driven ecosystem of services. I had been interested in the blockchain space since the early days of Bitcoin, and in the beginning of 2022 I joined Nuri, a banking startup, to lead the Wealth Domain."

Jack "Talk us through your current job and what it entails?"

Anirban "Nuri is essentially a banking startup offering legacy banking services like bank account, debit cards, etc along with cryptocurrency-backed financial products to help customers grow their wealth. It includes crypto-trading, long and short term investments and interest-bearing investments. As the Senior Engineering Manager for the Wealth domain, I essentially take care of the technology roadmap of the domain along with the people within the teams, their well-being, career aspirations and ensuring they remain motivated and engaged towards the company's mission and vision"

Jack "What were the main skills, technical and soft, you needed to develop in order to achieve what you have achieved?"

Anirban "On the technical side, it is important to realise the purpose behind the code one writes. Just writing a piece of software is not enough, and I always ensured that I was looking over the fence to see how that software was serving the customer's needs, how it was being marketed, shipped and delivered. Understanding what the customer wants, and how the software I wrote was the key link to solve a problem they had, helped me progress a lot in my career. As a senior manager in the engineering chapter, within the team it is important to be able to talk to software engineers in their language, the language of code and software. But at the same time, learning, observing and hearing them, helped me understand them as people.

It was a good amount of professional leadership training coupled with common sense and the realisation of "how would I expect to hear this from my manager", that helped me a lot to be here."

Jack "What are the steps someone could take in their career if they wanted to follow in your footsteps?"

Anirban "I think first, one must be clear in understanding whether Engineering Leadership is what they want to really do in their career. If you are "trying it out", an engineering manager's role could easily be a very confusing one for you.

One thing that helped me a lot in my early days, was to find one or max two people you would treat as role models. They need not be (actually should not be celebrities like Musk, etc) but rather regular people who you think you want to be in 5 or 10 years. Once you have the role model, follow their moves, think about why they decided something the way they did, try anticipating how they think, and follow them. Ask them for guidance and if possible mentorship. Ask them or your manager for an opportunity to try out your skills.

Professional courses are always useful to bring in baseline knowledge of management skills, and mindset; to get your disciplinary thinking process running.

But real learning is through experience, which your role models can easily share with you. I have had about 3 people till now who I always looked up to as role models, and followed their advise, caution, guidance. This has been an immense reason for me to be where I am today."

Jack "Why did you initially take an interest in Web3?"

Anirban "Web1 was when people started consuming information from the internet. You could go to Google and read a book instead of going to a library.

Web2 was when people started producing content alongside consuming content. If you wanted to talk to 20 people in a group, you no longer had to speak up on a platform. You could simply upload a video on Youtube and share it with them, or on Facebook or similar platforms. This is also when the digital transformation of everything in our lives started. But Web2 led to consolidation of services being in the hands of a few big companies ( the Big Tech companies )

Web3 is when people participate in hosting parts of the internet while continuing to consume and produce content for the internet. The existence of blockchain and the continuously lowering cost of running services on blockchains has made it possible for true distribution of control and knowledge of services from across the globe; thereby increasing security and trust manifold.

The concept of Web3 and the underlying blockchains is so powerful that it can be used for anything and everything that you see around you today. The impact that it can have is much bigger than how 4g/5G or IoT changed telecommunications, or how Henry Ford changed transportation.

I simply could not be on the sidelines, and just had to jump in to ride the tide, a rather bumpy one I must say at this point."

Jack "In your eyes, what is the biggest impact Web3 will have on the world?"

Anirban "With the current evolution, Web3 can literally re-define life as we know it. What the exact impact will be, remains to be seen. We humans are pretty smart at innovating; only time will tell what we build from this concept.

But a prelude to that can be seen right now. Money. The Euro or dollar note that you have in your pocket has been the same that your grandparents and their grandparents probably had. That 1 dollar note in your backpocket would buy you 20 loafs of bread back then, and maybe 1 loaf today. But the basic underlying concept always remained the same. You give that paper note to the shop owner and you get a certain amount of bread. The amount of bread you get in return of that $1 changed through the times due to inflation/deflation which is highly influenced by governments, banks and financial institutions. Now with cryptocurrency, all of us have the same currency with the same denominations and same value no matter where we are."

Jack "Web3 encompasses a lot of areas - from blockchain, cryptocurrency, DeFi, Gaming, NFTs, the Metaverse and more. Do you think all of these areas will be adopted by the masses or do you think there will be a specific area which will come out of top? And why?"

Anirban "Web3 will touch and change everything you mentioned and more. The question is when it happens and what changes happen. Traditional finance and Cryptocurrency was obviously the first one to ride the wave of change, which is still ongoing. I am sure every other sector like object ownership and NFTs, Finance management and DeFi, Gaming and many other industries will go through their own mini revolution to be influenced by Web3. But depending on the existing social, economic, geographic conditions and local regulations, the influence on each of these sectors will vary."

Jack "What do you think the future holds for Web3?"

Anirban "I think it depends what timeframe in the future we are talking about. The next few years will definitely see a lot of evolution and changes happening. Some changes will become permanent and then on a norm; while other changes will fade away.

Web3 is being embraced by the biggest technology companies in the world, and also by large financial institutions. That being said, humans are highly unpredictable and intelligent beings. It is difficult to predict how they will innovate and change their own future.

However, what is for sure is that our next generation will perceive life in a very different way than how we see it. From shopping to studies, to culture, socio-economic conditions, everything will be very different for them.

It is on us to ensure that we leverage the power of Web3 to build a better future for them, and not just "a future".

Jack "What does the future hold for you personally?"

Anirban "I think in software, one's career rides on trends. With each new trend, you learn something new, fail a few times, refine your skills, and just better every passing day. If you look back at the history of software, then the trends I am talking about are Web2.0, cloud computing, IoT, FinTech, Web3, and whatever comes next.

I personally wish to be updated with the latest technologies around, with a good sense of working on it myself, while also nurturing teams to build successful products using those technologies."

Jack "What is one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to make a career in Web3?"

Anirban "Web3 is a completely different type of thinking. It is like nothing you will have learnt in school or college or that traditional large companies are working / talking about today.

If you seriously want to get into Web3 you have to start learning on your own. There are tons of resources available on Youtube and learning portals that can help you get going.

Another thing to understand is the difference between building a blockchain and building on the blockchain. Web3 companies are increasingly separating themselves based on whether they build by touching the blockchain itself or if they build a service that wraps on top of a blockchain. The 2 domains require very different skillsets, and will likely pan-out (in terms of career growth) in very different directions.

If you want to build by "touching" the blockchain you will need heavy skillsets with computation-heavy languages like Rust, C++, etc with some amount of consumer-facing backend languages like Golang and smart contracts.

If you want to build services wrapping around the blockchain, then you will need flexible backend systems capable of extreme scale (like Go, Java) coupled with some amount of smart contract interactions and then frontend systems."

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We really enjoyed understanding Anirban's career journey. He shared some interesting thoughts on the future of Web3 and shared some brilliant tips on skills to learn and develop to build a career in the space.

We'll be keeping a close eye on Anirban's journey for the years to come!

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To get involved with Behind The Blockchain or for recruitment related conversations reach out to Jack on Jack@unveilrecruitment.com