I joined Lablup in April 2021, it has been now 8 months and I would like to make a quick introduction about my experience so far.
Application Process
I previously have been working for a financial related company in Yeouido. I made great experiences there and met awesome people. One of them joined Lablup last year and told me great things about the company. So I wanted to give it a try and sent my resume. After being contacted back, I had an examination related to programming and an interview. If you are interested by job openings, feel free to visit Lablup’s webpage which is updated regularly.
Background
During my scholarship, back in France, I had the opportunity to study abroad for a semester. At that time, I did not know much about South Korean culture or the country itself but since my younger ages, I always have been into Japanese video games and animations which made me develop a huge interest for Asia. In 2016, a new partnership with Seoul National University of Science and Technology has been made with my university. The same day, my professor made an announcement, asking who would like to go 6 months in South Korea, and somehow, my hand just raised itself. It was my first time living abroad and in a country with its own culture, much different from my home country. I met people who became great friends, learnt a lot from human perspective to skills, after all it was all about studying. But every good thing often come to an end, and so did my experience in South Korea. Before my graduation I started to wonder what would I do. Most of my classmates were applying to companies in France, and some scouting already started to happen. But I did not feel it right, I just wanted something different. I just felt like I want to experience more in South Korea, I want to try something different. I started to gather information about visa application, housing, job offer applications. After my graduation, I booked a flight and flew to Seoul, after what I started to look for a company. While doing my master degree, one of my majors was cybersecurity, and I wanted to start building my experience around it. I soon found a company related to financial business who told me have some needs in security as well as web development. During this time, I met great people who shared with me their knowledge and one of them moved to Lablup. He told me about Lablup’s open-source projects, research projects in AI, wide range but cutting-edge technologies involving cloud computing and fast-growing pace. He picked my attention around the same time, Lablup started to recruit more IT engineers and developers. In consequence, I applied and went through the recruiting process which consists of first a resume screening, then a programming test followed by a couple interviews.
About Lablup
Lablup is most likely one of the most attractive technology startups in Korea if you have interest in cloud computing, software or/and AI works related. Everyone is very passionate and extremely competent. Lablup develops and runs Backend.AI, which is a system resource management platform for AI research. More precisely, it is a container-based computing cluster orchestrator which hosts multiple programming languages and ML related frameworks. It allocates and isolates computing resources for multiple computation sessions. On my very first weeks at Lablup, I had some assignment to install and run backend.AI on my local machine but also some work using similar tools in order to have a first use case. One of them was to build a chatting application using aiohttp, an asynchronous http client/server (repository). The whole landing process was very smooth and everyone was open to any questions, willing to be helpful. This made it easy for me to enjoy my work and gave me from the start a very good impression of the company.
Experience
At the very first weeks after joining Lablup, I mainly worked on simple tasks and issues solving for Backend.AI in order to get a hand on the platform architecture and the workflow of the company and developers' team. Backend.AI has a complex architecture and having some time and good first issues was a must during this period of time. After understanding how parts interacts with each other, I shared my understandings about domain, group, users and policy management system through a presentation where I went step by step through functions calls, data storage and logic behind.
Licenses Management
Backend.AI is an open-source software but to get full functionalities as well as Lablup engineers support, companies or individuals have to purchase License. The concept of license might seem relatively simple as it ‘just’ gives access to a software if the user has made the purchase, in fact the system behind it is more complex. We have to create encrypted keys for each user, generate custom made license keys, have the system check if a key is still valid through requests, update expiration dates, etc. There is a lot of work not only numeric but also human. In order to get simplify the process I have been mostly working on integrating our license server into a back office to give a better view and access to all the license management. This project not only involved for me to learn about Golang (programming language developed by Google) but also have a much deeper understanding of AWS cloud, instances and Group Security management. My time was shared between learning and working. I often was able to look at external or internal resources during my working time in order to complete or improve my work. I also could count on my colleague's feedback especially with code review or simply while talking over a cup of coffee.
Last words
As an orchestrator, Backend.AI involves to work on many components such as Manager, Agent, storage proxy and so on. Working with Lablup implies working on a wide spectrum of tools and programming languages, and build a deep understanding of related topics I often ask myself what would I be doing in 5 years or more. It is not easy to answer this question as I also think a lot of hopes leads to a lot of disappointment however, I really hope Backend.AI will be much more widely used and that I will keep working on it while also getting other interesting projects to tackle. I will work hard and follow my passion of programing to become an indispensable element for my company and my coworkers. If you also are passionate about programing or anything related to AI, cloud computing or IT in general; if you are interested by working with other passionate and talented people, you probably should consider joining Lablup.
Thank you for reading.