Headline

Chief of Staff at Gradly

About

I've spent the last 5+ years at Gradly — a health insurance startup for international students in the US — going from solo founding engineer to Chief of Staff. I started by building the company's entire backend from scratch. As Gradly grew, so did my scope: I led engineering as a team, built out our claims and payments infrastructure, shipped an AI-powered support system, and integrated a handful of insurance carrier partners. Along the way I picked up whatever the company needed — EDI standards in a week, sales strategy, partnerships, fundraising, hiring. Today I sit next to the CEO on company strategy and partnerships while still owning Product, Engineering, and Operations end-to-end. I like ambiguous, ground-zero problems — the kind where you're building the process as much as the product. Technical enough to build it myself, operational enough to run the business around it.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

claude

codex

cursor

grok

langchain

Work experience

Chief of Staff at Gradly, May 2025 - Present · 1 yr 5 mos, ◦ CEO's direct proxy on company strategy, partnerships, and legal/administrative work; own Product/Engineering, Operations, and Customer Success end-to-end ◦ Designed and launched a customer referral/reward program that grew the customer base without added acquisition spend ◦ Manage a 10-person team (engineering, design, support, marketing, growth); led 30+ interviews, hired 8

Software Engineer → Product Lead at Gradly, Feb 2023 - May 2025 · 2 yrs 4 mos, ◦ Grew engineering from a solo function into a 5–6 person team as Tech Lead/Product Lead, owning architecture, hiring, and execution ◦ Built dashboard.gradly.us — sales analytics, customer lifecycle tracking, policy administration, multi-provider payments (Stripe, Square, Mercury) ◦ Led the customer-facing product suite (gradly.us, insurance.gradly.us, app.gradly.us); migrated React to Next.js, built a new design system ◦ Architected the AI Insurance Concierge — a RAG system drafting context-aware replies across email, WhatsApp, SMS, and live chat with human-in-the-loop review; built an AI auto-tagging system for support routing ◦ Learned EDI standards in under a week; built automated EDI infrastructure for SisCo and FivePoints with zero production issues ◦ Built Gradly's claims platform (submission/processing/status APIs, OpenAI-powered PDF extraction, Mercury ACH reimbursements); integrated 5 insurance carriers ◦ Built Gradly's mobile app (React Native) — insurance document access, provider lookup, claims management, premium payments, in-app support

Independent Contractor | Software Engineer at Gradly, Jul 2021 - Feb 2023 · 1 yr 8 mos, ◦ Joined as Gradly's sole engineer; built the company's entire core backend, including first partner integrations (GBG, WellAway) ◦ Built an early AI Q&A prototype (LLM over insurance plan brochures), later productionized ◦ Laid the technical foundation that later grew into broader ownership of product, internal systems, and automation at Gradly ◦ Built data workflows for reporting, sales operations, CRM updates, and internal tracking, turning repeated manual tasks into lightweight, repeatable tools ◦ Worked across engineering, sales, and operations to identify bottlenecks and ship practical fixes ◦ Built scheduled jobs, scrapers, and backend automations (Python, Zapier, Firebase Cloud Functions), reducing manual data collection and improving access to internal business data

Education

Master of Computer Applications - MCA, Computer Science, Shri Vaishnav Vidyapeeth Vishwavidyalaya, Indore

Bachelor of Computer Application - BCA, Mathematics and Computer Science, Shri Vaishnav Vidyapeeth Vishwavidyalaya, Indore

Public links

github: https://github.com/animesh-algorithm

leetcode: https://leetcode.com/animesh_algorithm

animesh.cc: https://animesh.cc/