# Ramp 3/30/2026 July 2022, an old friend of mine, Veeral, DMed me about engineering roles at this small startup called Ramp — which I sort of knew about from Twitter memes about “b2b saas” and “corporate card rivalries,” but not much more. This place went on to change the trajectory of my career, as someone who came in relatively early career, and I’m in a place now where I’d like to make this arc legible to myself in retrospect. ![[ramp-team-paint-night.jpeg|]] ![[ramp-team-car-selfie.jpeg|]] ![[ramp-team-sailing-nyc.jpg|]] ![[ramp-team-sailing-closeup.jpg|]] ![[ramp-team-bumper-cars.jpg|]] ![[ramp-team-poker-miami.jpg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307191006.png|]] ![[ramp-team-dinner.jpg|]] ![[IMG_4656.png|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307191311.png|]] ![[ramp-team-selfie-architecture.jpeg|]] --- ![[veeral-dm-ramp-recruiting.jpeg|DM from an old friend and mentor, Veeral|300]] When I got the message from Veeral; I was open to the conversation for a few reasons. - I already wanted a reason to switch. - I had friends at Ramp (Veeral, Kwuang, Pavel from Twitter). - I’d *just* left New York. CO was more convenient for friends / relationship / family, but I still had a degree of attachment to NY, and this was a (turns out, *the*) NY startup, that would let me travel back in doses. - [Packy McCormick hype post](https://www.notboring.co/p/ramping-up) I still remember the interview process well. I remember pushing Pavel on what he perceived the long-term ambitions of the company to be. Patrick and I mostly talked about Hacker News and public markets investing (the latter I still don’t know a lot about) — Miami in his background, from the Founders Fund office. The technical challenges were hard enough to feel good about completing; but I also didn’t care enough about the outcome (yet) to let my nerves kick in. I was disillusioned after working in crypto — on a world-changing mission, that I still believe in! — but in a [resource-cursed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse) environment that had lost its discipline. I’d talked to a bunch of crypto teams & investors around the time — wanting badly to double-down, but finding the same reality-distortion field everywhere. I found Ramp refreshing. I *liked* that “corporate cards” were something Twitter made fun of you for working on; knowing that the *people* working on them, were as good as they were. That the scope was — quietly — to upgrade how business is done, and how businesses run, at large. The discrepancy felt “alpha”-shaped. --- Leaving my golden handcuffs behind gave me this faith that I’d leave Ramp if I didn’t like it. I thought that *even if* Ramp was good, I’d probably spend two years there, and leave. I stayed way longer than I thought I would. I joined in October 2022, on the Bill Pay team — joining a few other engineers on an emerging “Payments” pod: Shreyan (my manager, creator of Ramp’s Payments Platform), Andrew (in charge of hazing me with his intense crypto skepticism and a mountain of regulated money movement trivia), Clara, and later Leina. Pavel was the founding tech lead behind Ramp Bill Pay, my skip-level, and just 21 years old. This excited me — clearly this was a place that rewarded slope with great opportunity — but I was also curious how it’d go in practical terms. He turned out to be a great leader, of a growing org — also a high-output/agency IC — and I learned a *lot* working for him: in matters of prioritization, candor, [gumption](https://x.com/krrishd/status/2030525286949994519?s=46), and speed. ![[slack-pavel-slackmoji.jpg|We’re a big Slackmoji culture|300]] My onboarding task was to add mailed paper check as a payment method to Bill Pay. Seemed straightforward enough, and I got it “done” — excited that I was *trusted* to! — but I was in for a hard reality check. We were printing, as the check’s memo, the contents of an “invoice number” field in the UI, rather than a distinct memo field. Also, we defaulted to Ramp’s office address for the `return_address`. ![[ramp-returned-check-envelope.jpg|]] Our punishment: a bunch of vendors who couldn’t figure out what the check was paying them for (they’d need the memo), and mailing them back to the Ramp office. My specific punishment: the guilt for inviting this hell onto my Product Ops counterpart Pravika, who’d joined the same time as me, and was in the NY office triaging hundreds of physical checks while I was supporting remotely. For the record, checks are great — you’d be surprised how powerful and essential a “rail” they are in 2026.  The sheer *reality* embedded in this problem space — the wrong bug causing actual physical mayhem — scratched a major itch for me. I wasn’t abstracted away from what we actually did for people. I got addicted to that feeling of responsibility: I’d learned to email customers personally to triage their payments edge cases (eg. step-ups), built our original monitoring stack, and compulsively stared at everything that could go wrong. Kat, Pravika, and I were CC’ed on every single customer payment failure email — and for a while directly supported them in thread as they needed (using our learnings as input into self-service UX). I’d see the names of the business in the tooling, sometimes their counterparty; and I felt a sense of responsibility around making sure these economic participants - patriots! - were able to get settled up. There was so much *meaning* embedded in the work, relative to anything I’d ever worked on. ![[slack-pavel-couscous-gratitude.jpg|Couscous is our internal token of gratitude|400]] Ramp gave me serious responsibility far earlier than anyone else would, and has always been a place that: - under-hires — [perfect-pathologically](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/#:~:text=Idealized%20organizations%20are%20not%20perfect.%20They%20are%20perfectly%20pathological.) — and makes everyone an *owner* of a major function. before AI made it common sense to. - values slope over intercept — to a near-absurd degree. My skip-level going from intern straight to founding tech-lead of a multi-billion dollar TPV payments product, teammates with previous lives as eg. Minecraft modders, etc. It felt like a place to do high-stakes work with high standards — maintained by mature leaders like [Patrick](https://builders.ramp.com/post/engineering-management) — but with a bunch of “kids” like myself tackling these problems for the first time with fresh eyes. A few months into my time, Shreyan put in his notice. He took some time to explore, came back to set foundations that’d turn into Ramp Treasury, and then left again to be Elad Gil’s Chief of Staff. Andrew switched to platformize cards, Leina to lead a platform around Ledger; Pavel, Rodda, Clara, and Patrick left to [start](https://trymoab.com) [companies](https://silnahealth.com) together. I was given the chance to lead Payments at Ramp, and my first direct report. ![[IMG_4606.png|The day I was assigned my first direct report, Patrick sent me his characteristically to-the-point “Definition of a manager”]] Kat, my PM counterpart on Payments, saw room for growth re: my understanding of our customers and the business. She took me along to sales calls, customer calls, conversations with our own AP accounting, strategic and corporate finance teams — pushed me to spend more time across the org — and was a major teacher (and friend) to me in the process. I learned that Ramp isn’t a place where engineers receive specific instructions from product to implement. Ramp engineers make product decisions based on their *own* knowledge of the customer, market, and primitives — in partnership with PM — the same way Ramp PMs now *implement* entire features with tools like Ramp Inspect. Everyone gets to do everything. --- Within a year of my time, though, much of the team I’d started with had already left the company or spun off into leads of new teams within: hard to avoid at a company of natural founders and leaders. AI was also ascendant, recruiting heavily, and a lot of my pre-Ramp colleagues had reconvened at a major lab. I still had a lot to learn in Payments, though, and yet to convince myself that I could lead a function of this importance at a company like this. I wasn’t going to let myself off the hook, yet. Kat and I were tasked with major international expansion: not just being able to *pay out* international counterparties, but being able to make payments *on behalf of international entities and businesses*, originating payment *locally* across Canada, the EU, UK, and beyond. This would necessarily be a long-term project; across new cross-border/FX flows, bespoke partnerships, onboarding & underwriting, and more — powering our biggest multinational clients. This was also the initiative I felt like I had to deliver to the business, before I could even *consider* anything new. Kat, Tristan, and I spent time poring over half-conforming ISO-20022 docs and spreadsheets; on calls with half-technical “implementation” teams at the banks, plugging stuff into a prehistoric version of ChatGPT, building with pre-REST technologies my parents would be more familiar with. We got our first local collection rails live pretty quickly. The challenges in Bill Pay & Reimbursements — in which neither counterparty is Ramp, unlike collections — were business ones rather than purely technical. We had to solve currency conversion in light of slower funding rails, where FX rates could move against us by the time we’d received funding. Debit authorization in new geos. Brokering agreements and flows between partner A licensed to acquire/pull, and partner B to payout, etc. I was surprised at how many of these “business problems” were equally mine to co-design solutions to, as an engineer. But we got it done, and set Ramp in motion for true global expansion. <div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 300px; position: relative;"><iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1924265513&show_artwork=true" style="top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; border: 0;" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> ![[drake-canadian-banks-lyrics.jpeg|Dropped right as Anand K. and I - Ramp’s biggest Drake fans - shipped local Canadian reimbursements|400]] Kat left soon after for a new opportunity. We also added Osmar, who’d become my team’s go-to for international payments, and eventually founding member of a new “international platform” team to take Ramp to its next global markets. The pace started to accelerate, still with the same-ish number of people (maybe less) than I’d started with. ![[ramp-ad-denver-train.jpg|The lite-rail 2 minutes from my apartment.|400]] Most surreal in this period, though, was Ramp’s brand becoming more prominent. I lived in Denver — far away from “tech.” One random day, *every single* billboard around me started to be a Ramp one. Literally down to the bus stops next to my apartment. On the trains passing by my balcony windows. For like a year or more. I’d leave a long day of work to go on a walk, or to get dinner, and I was absolutely surrounded by Ramp. It was a trippy time. The contrast between Ramp on every billboard in a random city like Denver, and the fact that it was a group of three of us running Payments. Scaling up massive domestic volumes and operations, undertaking more international expansion. Our first bank and partner exams, audits, that I’d be responsible for. Taking new licenses and new partners live. A variety of new financial products for our end-customers. My brain was starting to anneal around payments and Ramp. And for all the stress, I loved it. ![[ramp-ad-denver-bus-stop.jpg|Right outside my apartment, where I thought was the middle of nowhere.|400]] --- Some time in late 2024, Stripe bought Bridge. Some people at the company asked me about it (as “ex-crypto” payments guy), and I had some theoretical answers about the opportunity to displace SWIFT (which is the single “traditional” rail without a good steel-man — it actually sucks). Vinai — friend and colleague who shipped Ramp’s first internationally-issued cards — Adam and Subham (product), Toshi (partnerships), and I went to the first “A Very Stable Conference” to hear more. Chapello (new PM on Payments) and Jon (financial partnerships) went to another stablecoin conference around the same time. We returned pre-aligned on the inevitable: we should kick the tires. Partnerships came together, we got an proof-of-concept for international payments live in short order, and as we entered the summer — Chapello dropped me and some of my peers on the Treasury team — Arnab, Moritz, Danielle, Fardeem, Mark — in a new Slack channel, for a “hackathon project.” The hackathon started the same day an incoming senior engineer on my team - Gian - started - so he joined us too. We shipped a winner. And Ramp tends to be pretty serious about doubling-down on these things: we’d earned the mandate to go and ship this for customers more formally, and we booked a week in Boulder to get it alpha-ready (and that we did). ![[IMG_3444.png|]] This was quickly on track to becoming a serious business unit — there was a push for my team to allocate full-time resources to it, so we wouldn’t have to trade off bandwidth between this frontier and our existing priorities. We hired the best person we talked to in the space — Alex — in a matter of a few weeks. A year later — we have meaningful international payments TPV settling (purely under the hood) via stablecoins instead of correspondent banking. We’ve launched a feature-complete version of Ramp usable *entirely* with these assets (and therefore — soon — usable “anywhere”).  Between Alex and Gian starting to shoulder the sorts of responsibility that’d traditionally be mine: my role started to shift into org support and adding payments context/guidance more broadly. --- I became — another — “kid” leader, who’d make you wonder as an observer about Ramp’s devotion to slope over intercept. ![[IMG_4266.jpeg|How it’s felt|400]] I became more opinionated about engineering culture, hiring, and roadmap in discussion with Matt and Harry (my manager and skip). I got to forward-deploy into projects for our most eccentric customer cohorts — each one eccentric in borderline [opposite](https://x.com/tryramp/status/2029565094502506636?s=46) ways — and reconcile them into a coherent product and platform. I worked on more skunkworks projects with friends, done outside of any of our roadmaps, without upfront justification. I sat in the Denver office with Alex — and an incredible GTM team — and would overhear customer problems on their calls, to which I’d get to hawk products and solutions that hadn’t been announced to most of the company yet. I went to more conferences (blame stablecoins) than are customary for engineers here, or even for myself for most of my tenure. In retrospect: it’s been an unbelievable privilege to work with this team, on this set of problems. Ramp is a great place to grow up. --- Ramp still feels so *small*. Teams like mine (Payments) are still basically as small as they were four years ago — we get our leverage in more creative ways. AI is also making it closer to a Gigafactory than a Tesla, and this goes for every single function in the business. The filters Ramp applies to hiring aren’t commonplace or even comparable to the rest of the industry. There isn’t another. ![[IMG_4646.jpeg|ramp.com/careers|400]] The frontier of Payments at Ramp, specifically, has gone from real-time payments and international expansion, to stablecoins (read: pure software money), and payments for AI agents, both of which are still in their macro infancy. A lot is about to be rebuilt entirely around these new paradigms, by small, resourceful startup-like teams within. I’ve seen glimpses of how this goes first-hand: Ramp gets to *invent* the standards for how payments will work in the future — aggregating demand from 50,000+ businesses who stand to gain tremendously from these frontier technologies, but need them operationalized well. There’s so much economic surplus left for Ramp to produce for its customers: and millions more of them, globally, to sign up and serve. [Ramp is hiring](https://ramp.com/careers).