An interview with Gautam Gupta, Engineering

What do you do at Alloy?

I am a Software Engineer at Alloy, which means that I get to translate the solutions to our customers’ problems into code. This work involves collaborating with other members on my team and the product manager to execute on the product vision.

Pre-Covid, I also took pride in being the Chief Snacks Officer of the Vancouver office—always trying to ensure that there was enough supply of the snacks and stocked shelves to meet consumption.

What’s been the most challenging part of your work so far?

Modeling the supply chain isn’t easy for a number of reasons: 

1. The amount of data you’re dealing with is huge—for any consumer brand there could be thousands of SKUs being sold at thousands of locations, and each SKU-location pair can have multiple data points for every day
2. There is no pre-defined network in which the goods flow—you need to be able to infer the network from all the different sources of data and put it together in a way that’s consumable by the user
3. Different types of products usually flow through different supply chain networks—for example, cold products like milk follow a different network than shelf stable products like candy, even if they’re manufactured by the same company
4. There are multiple layers in a network—goods produced at a production facility get stored at a warehouse, which then get shipped to third-party distributors, who in-turn supply them to the stores

One of my more challenging projects has been to model supply chain data in such a way that you’re able to do analysis on it in a matter of seconds, not hours. We should be able to aggregate data and quickly extract useful insights for our customers, like how long the inventory at a specific warehouse will last given downstream store-level sales.

What first interested you in Software Engineering?

I remember when I was around 12 years old, I wanted to hack my brother’s social account. I followed a simple phishing tutorial to gain access to his account. And of course, he got back at me by disconnecting the internet for a week. 

But once I had done that, the questions quickly changed from “How do I hack” to “How do I write this simple program?” And the curiosity just led me to teach myself programming while I was still in middle school. Computers and technology became my passion and I decided to turn it into my career!