Rohit Agrawal joined Rubrik 6 years ago and has had an illustrious career with us since then. He has been part of the Microsoft 365 Data Protection and Security team for the last 2 years, which is responsible for the air-gapped, immutability data backup which is built on the top of the Rubrik Zero Trust Data Security platform. It enables our customers to perform rapid and reliable recovery whenever needed for M365 Suite including Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
Beyond his technical prowess, Rohit's unwavering commitment to putting our customers first and his unwavering dedication to personal growth make him an invaluable asset to our team. Let’s dive into our conversation!
Why did you decide to join Rubrik?
When I started back in 2017, I wanted to join a startup as I think it gives you more opportunity and responsibility to grow at the early stage of your career. On top of it, the fast-paced culture of a startup is something that resonates with me.
I was introduced to Rubrik by one of my seniors from my undergrad university who was working at Rubrik for more than 4 years. He had a lot of interesting things to say including the solid engineering team we have, the challenging problems we are solving in the data protection and security space, and the engineering culture. I also got to know that Rubrik is one of the fastest-growing Silicon Valley startups. From all the positive feedback from multiple places, Rubrik just seemed to be the perfect place for me to start my career.
You’ve been at Rubrik for the last 6 years and have had the opportunity to move around to different Engineering teams. How has that experience helped you grow your skillset as a developer?
Rubrik allows us to switch teams seamlessly. In the last 6 years, I had the opportunity to work with 4 different teams and a few of them had completely different tech stacks. Switching the team can be a challenging decision as more often you are comfortable in your existing team and it may seem like climbing the ladder is easy if you stick to a single team.
For me, moving around the teams helped me in a couple of ways.
To come out of my comfort zone and challenge myself. This gives me new experiences and provides me with an opportunity to learn new skills. I believe upgrading and learning new skills are most important to be relevant in the software engineering field in the long run.
Made a lot of meaningful connections with Managers, Principals, and distinguished engineers which helped to get constant feedback and mentorship within the engineering and even outside of it.
At Rubrik, our values drive us on our mission to secure the world's data. Which RIVET Value do you identify with the most and why?
As a part of engineering, I believe we need to possess each of the values in RIVET to be successful. I resonate more with the V which is Velocity. I would define Velocity to be delivering the product to the market with speed along with high-quality execution. Low-quality work will eventually lead to tech debt and customer issues which will slow down the velocity in the long run.
I, along with the team, constantly look forward to ways to deliver the product faster to the customer. This has also helped us to succeed in Rubrik as it is still a fast-growing company and we need to execute fast to be competitive and move forward in the market.
How does Rubrik’s mission inspire the work you do? And what excites you most about the future?
In today’s world, with the increase in the experienced bad actors in society, data is more unsafe than it has ever been before. This includes data related to healthcare, education, and many different sectors. I truly believe the work we are doing around data protection and security matters to the customer and does solve a lot of problems in these areas. That is what has been the biggest inspiration for me.
We are focusing on multiple product lines but I believe cybersecurity would be the most exciting one going ahead. While we have made unprecedented growth in the cybersecurity space, I still believe we have just started to scratch the surface here and have a lot of exciting things to build. I am super excited to see Rubrik leading this space.
Rapid Fire Questions
First job?
First internship at IBM Research. My first full-time job is Software Engineer at Rubrik.
Favorite hobby?
Hiking and Travelling
Hidden talent?
A decent keyboard player
Favorite movie?
Forrest Gump
Last vacation?
Cancun
Are you interested in innovating and advancing the Zero Trust Data Security platform? Take a look at our open positions on our engineering team here.