Jan 16th, 2016, was the first day I stepped into the software engineering world. During my undergraduate studies, I realized Electronics wasn't my calling and started exploring opportunities in data science. A few months earlier, I'd taken a course called “Analytics Edge” by MIT on Edx, which piqued my interest in the field. Completing my first-ever programming assignments left me with a feeling of newfound power.
I was fortunate to be offered an internship at VIMANA, where I joined the data science team. The decision was primarily influenced by Alex, the then data science lead, who was impressed by my energy and enthusiasm. Despite my lack of a formal CS background, he decided to take a chance on me. Since then, Alex has been my mentor, and I owe much of my success to him.
While working on large datasets collected from machines at VIMANA, I developed a fascination towards the engineering side of things built to collect and analyze these massive amounts of data in realtime. Athulan, VIMANA's CTO & Founder, was instrumental in supporting me in transitioning to a backend engineering role.
I started writing APIs, understanding databases, building data pipelines and went deep into stream processing. I got an opportunity to work on Enrich, a real time stream processing engine which was our flagship product and very soon, given it was a small team, I was one of two owners of the entire data pipeline that handled 250k events every minute. The other lead Rakesh and I developed an excellent rapport, solving problems together with the help of our chief architect Barry.
I was considering pursuing a masters in CS outside of India to make up for my lack of a formal CS background. Eventually, I decided to pursue an online masters at Georgia Tech as I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to learn by being part of a company that was using bleeding edge tech to solve actual production problems and I wanted to be in India long term anyways.
In 2019, we got an incredible opportunity to build the data backend for a connected vehicles company. We had to scale our systems 40x and transform our data pipeline built for manufacturing to a generic data platform. Within a few months, we had the production system up which went on to handle 12 million events per minute streaming live from vehicles on the ground. Overcoming the technical challenges involved in this transformation was immensely rewarding and pushed me to grow both technically and professionally.
In 2021, there was an opportunity to build a proof of concept for a high throughput system in the testing and measurement domain for a company called HBK. We successfully completed the POC and in a surprising turn of events, HBK decided to acquire VIMANA.
Although joining HBK gave me insight into working within a larger corporate structure, it was too slow for me. I missed building, I missed the pace, and I decided to go back to startups.
When I was offered the chance to lead the Engineering team at a fitness startup for a wearable and mobile application based product, I grabbed the opportunity. Building a product from scratch in an unfamiliar tech stack, for a completely new domain, where what I built directly affected the well being of end users, turned out to be a very satisfying experience.
It took us about 3 months to have our first release, and we had a polished product by end of the first year. I even pitched in on sales. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the traction we had hoped for. I learnt first hand about not just building products, but how to execute and prioritise, run tight experiments, talk to customers, and know when to pivot. I was burnt out and wanted to take a break, but a much bigger opportunity came knocking.
At VIMANA, I had scaled systems 40x from 250k to over 12 million events per minute. At NETRIN, I proved to myself that I could build a product from scratch. I was now looking for something specific - a well-funded startup with a small team, where I could carry over everything I'd learned and pour fuel on the fire. In my first 9 years, I'd mostly worked with the same set of people (we like to call ourselves the VIMANA mafia), and I wanted the experience of managing a completely new team.
Propelld gave me all of that, and then some. What I walked into turned out to be the toughest problem I've ever dealt with. The company was transitioning to do more business as an NBFC (Edgro), which meant a massive migration off legacy systems, building a new tech stack to support two new verticals, and doing all of this with a team that had been through some churn and cultural challenges. I had to take stock, rebuild trust in the tech team, restructure, make some new hires - and thank god for AI - act as the biggest IC on the team through all of it, working 6.5 days a week through most of my first year.
A year in, I've managed to set up an 8-member tech team handling a few thousand crores of AUM and thousands of loan applications a day, with a new tech stack built from scratch and a migration plan in place. I work closely with five different function heads and the co-founders, prioritising all of tech and product work. I'm still the biggest IC on the team, but I'm trying to shift a good portion of my time towards building newer projects rather than just providing velocity for existing work.
If I thought a seed-stage startup was hard, a funded Series D startup is way harder. We want to build an engineering team that transforms the company into a tech-driven lending organization - driving cost efficiency, rethinking credit underwriting with AI, and enabling every business function with technology.
Education
