Written by: Chow Ying Tong

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• What is your role and what were your responsibilities?
• Why did you join Ant International?
• What did your day-to-day look like?
• Is the 996 culture real?
• What were the challenges you faced and how’d you overcome them?
• How did you prepare for the interview?
• What was your greatest achievement at Ant International?
• Were there any fun events or social activities at Ant International?
• Would you recommend Ant International to your juniors or batch mates?

Introduction

Ant International is a global digital payments, digitisation, and financial technology provider. Originally a subsidiary of Ant Group, which in turn is closely affiliated with Alibaba Group, Ant International spun off into an independent entity in 2024. Headquartered in Singapore, it has operations in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Australia, spanning over 50 countries.

Ant International’s global presence is anchored by four core business pillars, Alipay+ (it powers Touch ‘n Go eWallet, GrabPay, ShopeePay, just to name a few), Antom, Bettr, and WorldFirst.

Their global R&D hub is located in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Their Kuala Lumpur office was established in 2024, and the office is located at Exchange 106 in TRX.

What is your role and what were your responsibilities?

I joined Ant as a Backend Engineer Intern, as part of the Ant Bank HK team. The team is in charge of developing and maintaining the Ant Bank HK digital bank ecosystem, ensuring everything runs smoothly and with minimal downtime. My tasks were focused on two areas: the internal back-office operations platform and an internal knowledge-base upkeep pipeline.

Although my official role was backend engineer intern, I actually did full-stack work, including frontend, backend, and QA tasks. Over the past few months, Ant has adopted an AI-first workflow, and they’ve been gradually integrating full-stack tasks into all developers’ job scope.

Why did you join Ant International?

I wanted to dip my toes into the fintech sector, and joining Ant seemed like the most obvious choice, seeing that they’re an industry leader and pioneer in the field. Being a regular user of digital payment platforms like Touch ‘n Go eWallet piqued my interest in seeing how things work behind the scenes, so it was a no-brainer.

Other than that, I started applying for internships very early (almost 5 months ahead of my actual internship start date), so only a handful of companies were willing to interview candidates that early on, Ant being one of them. They were the first company that I applied to and interviewed for. So in a way, the timing of everything worked itself out in the end.

What did your day-to-day look like?

Every morning, I’d arrive at the office at around 8:30. Then, I’d head to the pantry to grab some snacks for breakfast (side note: the pantry snack shelves are always stocked, so that’s pretty cool), and make coffee to start the day. After that, I’d continue where I left off the previous day, or if there are no outstanding tasks left, ask my mentor or supervisor for new tasks. Every day, I’d have a short conversation with my mentor to ensure that my work is completed on time and to cross off any doubts or questions that I might have. Every Friday, we had a team meeting, during which we give updates on our progress over the past week and discuss any roadblocks or uncertainties.

Lunch break was between 12pm to 2pm, leaving us ample time to have lunch. TRX’s lunch crowd is no joke, so everyone eating out leaves as early as possible to beat the queue. I’d usually take the MRT to MyTown for lunch for that reason.

On Wednesdays at 3pm, there would be some special treats that are only available for that week. As you can imagine, it’s quite a bloodbath in a way, as everyone rushes to the pantry at 3pm to grab those treats. While I was there, there were cupcakes, pastries, and one time there was even fried chicken.

Mondays and Fridays are “fruit days”, where each person would get a fruit snack. This can be apples, oranges, pears, and even avocados. Sometimes, there would be fresh coconut water to enjoy. Pretty nice!

At 6pm is when most people start packing up and head home. Interns are generally not encouraged to work overtime, unless you’re deploying something or dealing with an actual emergency.

Is the 996 culture real?

Now to address a major talking point surrounding Chinese companies—the notorious 996 work culture. For those that are unaware, 996 culture is an intense work schedule that requires employees to work from 9:00am to 9:00pm, 6 days a week. While occasional overtime is expected (even in non-Chinese companies), from my experience and observation, this environment isn’t present here in Malaysia. While most team leads and upper management are from Mainland China, they have largely agreed not to import this toxic work environment into Malaysia.

What were the challenges you faced and how’d you overcome them?

The biggest challenge I faced was having to learn everything from the ground-up. In case you didn’t know, Ant uses its own internal, proprietary tools for basically everything. For example, you’d imagine a company would use GitHub to host their codebases, Microsoft Teams/Slack for meetings/chats; but at Ant, they have an in-house version of GitHub/Git, their version of Slack/Microsoft Teams, their own deployment management platform, and even their own microservice application framework. Any piece of software or technology that a company uses, Ant most likely has its own in-house version. This meant that I couldn’t rely on my existing knowledge or search online to learn how to use those tools, which slowed down my onboarding quite a bit. The good news is, new joiners are given plenty of time (in my case, 3 weeks) solely for onboarding, and generally, everyone understands the rather steep learning curve can be quite challenging to navigate, so they’re very understanding and will do their best to help you out.

Another challenge was navigating documentation and understanding technical terms in Mandarin. Although Mandarin is my native language, everyday conversation and understanding technical terms were two completely different things. While Ant has been making progress on having English-only documentation, there are still times where retaining Mandarin is required, especially when working with our colleagues from China. Nonetheless, I seized the opportunity to improve my Mandarin computer science knowledge, and safe to say by the end of my internship, I got used to it and sometimes even preferred reading Mandarin. It’s all about repeated exposure.

How did you prepare for the interview?

I got 1 round of technical and 1 round of HR interview (note: they have since changed their interview structure and content, so experiences will differ). I practised a lot of Java-related questions, as I knew that Ant mainly uses Java and SOFABoot (an open source fork of Spring Boot developed by Ant). I also studied OS concepts like concurrency, multithreading, and race conditions.

For the technical round, I was asked some Java questions, some questions about my projects on my resume, and a Leetcode-style question. The questions weren’t too challenging but it was certainly nerve-wracking, as it was my first ever interview. For the HR round, it was more like a conversation rather than an interview, and I pulled through by just treating it as a chat session with the HR interviewers. My advice for this round is try not to stress out and just be yourself.

What was your greatest achievement at Ant International?

When I completed and deployed my first feature independently. Yes, I know, it might not seem like much, especially as someone who had been building and shipping features on real applications for quite a while, but it was a different experience deploying a feature in a system being used at this scale, not to mention I managed to not screw anything up (lol) so that was cool.

Were there any fun events or social activities at Ant International?

Well yes! There are regular badminton and pickleball sessions organized by employees (unsure of the schedule though). There’s also an annual (I think) badminton tournament where teams go against each other and fight to determine a winner. I also heard of basketball sessions being held too, so there is no shortage of fun activities to do.

For the Mid-Autumn Festival, a mooncake-testing event was held, where all employees were invited to taste test various flavours of mooncakes and vote for their favourite, and the most popular flavours would be included in the Mid-Autumn Festival gift box. Other than that, there was a tea time party in conjunction with Merdeka Day; we were all invited to enjoy a buffet-style tea break at the pantry. The food was delicious too!

On top of that, for my team personally, two team building events were held; we went bowling and had a staycation where we played board games and chit-chatted, so those were pretty cool as well. There was also a team outing to Redang Island, but I wasn’t able to join.

Would you recommend Ant International to your juniors or batchmates?

Yes! Although you might face some challenges if you’re not proficient in Mandarin, Ant International Malaysia has been consistently improving their English versions of documentation and developing innovative solutions to enable easier and seamless translations. While I was there, there was a Google Chrome extension that translated Mandarin to English in real-time, and that worked pretty well, so it’s not as challenging as it used to be. One of my friends who is Indian and doesn’t speak Mandarin also seemed to enjoy his time there just fine.

Other than that, the workplace environment was amazing, and the coworkers were extremely friendly, helpful, and willing to guide interns. Some teams are more stressful than others, but as long as you keep staying curious, eager to learn, and stay resilient, I’m sure it’ll be no problem. If you’d like to experience the developer life in the financial technology sector, Ant International definitely deserves your consideration.

And that’s a wrap for this blog! Got questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out! You can connect with Ying Tong on LinkedIn.

Until next time! ✌️