---
title: "Bhagwati Malav - Engineering Manager in Bengaluru | Tal"
description: "Meet Bhagwati Malav, Engineering Leader, Search & Discovery at Zepto based in Bengaluru. AI stack includes claude code, cursor, and gemini. Explore public work links including bhagwatimalav.substack.com."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/bhagwati-malav/share-image"
---

# Bhagwati Malav on Tal

## Headline

Engineering Leader, Search & Discovery at Zepto

## About

https://bhagwatimalav\.substack\.com/ \- Engineering Leader at Zepto, leading Search & Discovery systems at scale\. My team owns nearly every discovery experience you see in the app—from Search and Autosuggestions to Browse, Category Pages, Custom Merchandising Pages, Offer Pages, and Campaign Pages\. \- Metrics \- DORA, SPACE, AARRR, HEART, Developer Exp\. Index \- I focus on building high\-performing engineering teams and durable platforms by aligning ownership, system\-wide understanding, and long\-term velocity\. \- I strongly believe in building hero teams, not hero engineers—great systems scale through collaboration, not individual brilliance\. \- Led the end\-to\-end buildout of teams, systems, and engineering culture multiple times at Zepto, Paytm & Blibli\.com, delivering scalable, high\-impact platforms in high\-growth environments\. \- Previously at Paytm, I led teams across Search, Chat, and Recommendation, building products end\-to\-end from scratch while evolving large, high\-traffic platforms\. \- I’m excited by high\-scale, high\-impact problems that demand strong ownership, clear thinking, and thoughtful engineering leadership—especially where systems, teams, and business outcomes intersect\.

## Location

Bengaluru

## AI stack

claude code

cursor

gemini

langchain

claudecode

## Work experience

Engineering Manager at Zepto, Jan 2025 \- Present · 1 yr 9 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, My team owns nearly every discovery experience you see in the app—from Search and Autosuggestions to Browse, Category Pages, Custom Merchandising Pages, Offer Pages, and Campaign Pages\. Metrics \- DORA, SPACE, AARRR, HEART, Developer Exp\. Index MTTR < 3 min \( 45\-60 mins \- < 3 mins\) Lead Time for Changes\- 2 days Change Failure Rate\-18% Bus Factor 3\-4 https://blog\.zepto\.com/building\-search\-for\-a\-10\-minute\-world\-43b1992f5dca Team Building & Leadership \(15\+\) \- Built a motivated, resilient team from scratch by organizing engineers around purpose, mastery, ownership, and system\-wide understanding\. \- Introduced a 2\-day deployment cadence that reduced burnout, Evolved from a structured 2\-day deployment cadence to frequent, small\-batch releases\. \- AI Native SDLC \- Established multiple Dev Productivity Metrics \- Lead time to change, code review efficiency, on\-call excellence, change failure rate etc\. Engineering Impact \- Rebuilt the re\-ranking platform into a configurable system supporting 10\+ ranking variations without code changes\. \- Designed a scalable query understanding layer supporting n\+ attributes, boosting relevance across product types\. \- Built the Search Debugger, offering one\-view explainability and automating manual ops\. \- Re\-architected candidate retrieval to support live vector search with dynamic lexical/vector switching based on runtime signals, to fetch explore products, optimising latency and infra cost\. Conversion \+35% \- Introduced ScyllaDB Feature Store and delivered its first production use case: a sub\-ms ranking store ingesting multi\-level signals, powering 1m \+ requests/min with high read/write throughput\. Conversion \+15% \- OS \- Segment Replication \- 50% cost saving, supports 2x write throughput, 35% response time improvement, segment/compaction tuning\. \- Autosuggestion \- reduce cost by 68%, supports same throughpu

Engineering Manager/STL at Paytm Search, Chat & Recommendations\) at Paytm, Apr 2023 \- Jan 2025 · 1 yr 10 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Leading a team of 12\-14 engineers, Building & leading multiple products in Search, Personalisation & Recommendation Space using NLP, LLM, AI\. Leadership : \- Managed a team of 6–8 engineers, driving 1:1s, career growth, coaching, and mentoring through situational leadership\. \- Focused on keeping the team motivated by fostering mastery, purpose, and ownership\. \- Successfully built two products—Chat and Recommendation—end\-to\-end from scratch along with managing existing search platform\. Product : \- Building Paytm Super App Search Assistant \(Supports vector search, api based retrieval, entity uid mapper, custom response mapper, text\-to\-sql\) \- Deployed LLAMA2, 3 as a service/platform for internal use cases\. Explored vllm, text generation inference etc\., overall designed compute, response optimised solution\. \- Built LLM \+ Deep Learning based multi lingual Intent Classification\(70\+ intents\) and NER Detection for Indian Languages\. Accuracy \~ 80% , 99th response time < 1 sec\. \- Extending existing Search platform to support Voice & Semantic search use cases\. Open Source LLAMA 2, LangChain, OpenAI, Transformers based models, BiLSTM, Multi Language Intent/NER handling, Transfer Learning & Fine Tuning\. \- Building next version of User Personalisation platform\. \(Contextual MAB\) \- Built a model to detect Indian languages from transliterated input\. Accuracy \~ 80% \- Built a model to detect Indian names based on search input\.\(at prefix level\)\. Accuracy \~ 75 % \- Built in\-memory Low Latency Trie based spellchecker which gives suggestion at prefix level, also uses phonetic sound, performance metrics, keyboard distance to give spell suggestions\. 99\.9 response < 20 ms

Technical Lead \- Paytm & ONDC Search at Paytm, Apr 2022 \- Mar 2023 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, 6\+ million search hits per day, 150\+ million monthly active users, 20\+ million merchants\. Leading a team of 6\-8 engineers, and building multiple Search Products\( ONDC Search, Federated Search Platform, Location Aware Search, Search As You Type, Autosuggestion etc\.\) \- Making sure that we have highly available, fault\-tolerant, highly scalable, elastic, low latency systems\. \- 99th Response < 50 ms \- Serving millions of requests every day\. 0\. Building something exciting in NLP space for scale\. Transformers, BiLSTM, Multi Language handling, NER, ChatGPT etc\. 1\. Migrated ES cluster from ec2 to k8 setup with zero downtime, and keeping 100% data consistency\. 2\. SpellChecker for Search\-As\-You\-Type Platform\(Spell Correction at Prefix level\)\. 3\. Rearchitected Paytm Search Platform\(Federated Search\) to support vertical specific Search Experience\.\(No downtime, keeping 100% data consistency\) 4\. Built Geo Hash based location filtered Search\. 5\. Built ONDC Search/Discovery Platform \(Location Aware Search\) 6\. Built offline Search Relevance Measuring system, which can verify/figure out the correctness of test search approach\. Elastic search, Node, Typescript, Python, Django, uWsgi, Java, Springboot, Kafka, MySql, Performance Optimisation

Senior Software Engineer \- Paytm Search at Paytm, Jan 2021 \- Apr 2022 · 1 yr 4 mos, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India, Paytm Search 150\+ mn monthly active users, 20\+ mn merchants\. Leading the development team/building multiple Search products for millions of users\. 1\. Built/Led the development of Paytm Search V2\.0 experience from scratch\. \(Search As You Type\) 2\. Built/set up elastic cluster from scratch, lot of benchmarking to get required SLA, making sure that we have highly available, fault\-tolerant, highly scalable, elastic, low latency system\. \- Response\_99 < 60 ms, \- Serving millions of requests every day\. 3\. Worked on solving multiple Search Space problems from scratch for millions of users\. \(catalog with millions of docs, serves millions of search requests per day\. \) 4\. Took lots of tech initiatives/POC in terms of trying new technologies, tools and making awareness on using it\. 5\. Lots of work around breaking existing Search Systems into multiple micro\-services with DDD\(Domain Driven Design\), separation of concerns, reusability, focusing on choosing the right tech stack etc\. 6\. Lots of work around benchmarking, performance engineering, making sure that we respond in minimal time\(response 99 < 65 ms\) Apache AB, ESRally 7\. Re\-Built existing search classifier to framework model which can run multiple versions of classifier without any code changes\. Making sure that Response\_99 < 6 ms 8\. User\-based A/B framework, serving millions of requests every day\. Elastic search, Node, Typescript, Python, Django, uWsgi, Java, Springboot, Kafka, MySql, Performance Optimisation

Senior Software Engineer at Blibli, Oct 2020 \- Nov 2020 · 2 mos, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India, Coviam v2\.0 \| Blibli\(https://www\.blibli\.com/\) Loved my journey at Coviam/Quinbay\(Blibli\.com\), learned lot of things here :\) 1\. Worked on building distributed, event driven, fault tolerant and highly scalable data auditing system which can be used across all the services\. 2\. Also worked on setting up search interface for getting the audit data using ElasticSearch\.

Senior Software Engineer at Blibli, Jan 2020 \- Sep 2020 · 9 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area, Blibli\(https://www\.blibli\.com/\) 1\. Worked on building Blibli\.com B2B E\-Commerce platform from scratch\(Sales order creation, order approval, order creation, order fulfilment etc\.\) Worked with 6 other engineers, and led the technical direction of product \. Worked on setting up all the required micro\-services from scratch eg: order, customer, product, cart, finance etc, setup end to end data pipeline for the same\. java, springboot, kafka, mongodb, postgres, redis, gcp, consul, vault\. 2\. Working on building catalog management system for Blibli\.com Tivo\(Ticket and voucher\) which takes care of multiple use cases eg: profit configuration, inventory management, catalog management, data auditing etc\. java, project reactor, kafka, elastic search, mongodb, springboot, gcp, consul, vault

Senior Software Engineer at Supr Daily, Aug 2019 \- Dec 2019 · 5 mos, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India, Joined as 6th member of tech team, worked on building Master Address system, Delivery Assist system\. Python, Django, Postgres, aws lambda

Senior Software Engineer at Blibli, Nov 2018 \- Aug 2019 · 10 mos, Bengaluru Area, India, Blibli\(https://www\.blibli\.com/\) \- Coviam 1\. Worked on creating highly scalable Promo creation systems\.\(which touches multiple services eg: cart, search, product, pricing, merchant etc\.\) 2\. Worked on building Promo Scheduler, Email Scheduler\. 3\. Worked on Price Scheduling, Price Indexing, Dynamic Pricing\. 4\. Worked on setting up services for moving to gcp\(consul, vault, docker, kubernetes \)\. 5\. Worked on upgrading Mongo DB from 3\.2\.18 to 4\.0\.3 for catalog system\.

Software Engineer at Blibli, Jul 2017 \- Oct 2018 · 1 yr 4 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Blibli\.com Worked on core services of Indonesian Ecommerce\(Blibli\.com\)\. Spring data, Spring boot , redis, mongodb, kafka, scala, play framework, Solr, Microservices\. 1\. Worked on adding new payment methods for various banks\. 2\. Worked on building order summary apis for merchant side users\. \(Scala, Play\) 3\. Worked on building Birthday rewards feature which sends voucher to customers\. 4\. Worked on building generic, distributed crawling framework which allows to extract products information for various product sources/ecommerce sites\. 5\. Worked on building generic data extraction/massager framework\. 6\. Worked on building real time price comparison application which works for various categories eg: handphone, computer, camera, health & food, drink, washing machine, tv, refrigerator\. 7\. Worked on building distributed multi mapping recommendation feature which gives multiple master products recommendation for given merchant product\.

Software Engineer at Oracle, Apr 2016 \- Sep 2017 · 1 y 5 mo, bengaluru

Software Engineer at Cerner Corporation, Jan 2015 \- Mar 2016 · 1 y 2 mo, bengaluru

## Education

B\.Tech, Information Technology, Vellore Institute of Technology

## Public links

- bhagwatimalav\.substack\.com: https://bhagwatimalav\.substack\.com/

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/bhagwati-malav)

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