The Journey

After nearly four years inside Oracle RDBMS engineering, I was laid off in April 2026. This is what I'm doing with that.

NOW

Building in public. Writing. OSS projects. Distributed systems at implementation depth. Becoming a voice for women in tech.

Zeba Ali
APR 2026

Oracle India layoffs. Nearly 4 years as MTS IC2, Server Technologies Group. Nominated for SMTS IC3 by manager. Ended anyway.

2022–2026

Oracle India · MTS IC2 · RDBMS 23ai & 19c. 5B row concurrent workloads. Vector search benchmarking framework adopted cross-team. Fortune 500 production escalations. 150 bugs filed, 13 shipped to production releases. 4 RDBMS features owned end-to-end.

2021–2022

Wabtec Corporation · Software Engineer Intern. Java backend pipelines. MS SQL Server integrations. MDM automation with Informatica PowerCenter.

MAY 2022

B.Tech Computer Science · IGDTUW, Delhi NCR

“I never watched a tutorial.
I learned by doing, by failing, and by building.”

Currently Learning

  • Distributed Systems Consensus protocols, replication, CAP theorem at implementation level
  • Java Internals JVM, GC mechanics, concurrency primitives
  • LLD Design patterns, SOLID, real system-level thinking
  • HLD System design trade-offs I can defend end-to-end
  • Spring Boot Building real backend services, not just knowing annotations

Open To

I'm currently open to backend engineering roles — Java, Spring Boot, distributed systems, database engineering. If the work is technically deep and the team cares about craft, I want to hear about it.