---
title: "Chirag K. - Builder in Greater Bengaluru Area | Tal"
description: "Meet Chirag K., Hands-on engineering leader | Full-stack, distributed systems, applied AI | ex-PayPal, ex-Symantec, ex-SAP based in Greater Bengaluru Area. AI stack includes claude code and claude."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/chirag-kothari/share-image"
---

# Chirag K\. on Tal

## Headline

Hands\-on engineering leader \| Full\-stack, distributed systems, applied AI \| ex\-PayPal, ex\-Symantec, ex\-SAP

## About

Hands\-on engineering leader, 15\+ years across web applications, distributed serving layers, and data products\. I was a founding engineer of the Kayrros India office and helped build the team from the ground up\. I now lead engineering across our geospatial platform: the serving layer for 20\+ data products, a self\-service compute platform for data scientists, and the micro\-frontend app platform product teams ship on\. Before that, search and refund systems at PayPal, and telemetry ETL over terabytes at Symantec\. Day to day that means architecture, design review, and writing code\. On the leadership side, I helped set up the practices: hiring bar, incident management, release process\. Most of my time now goes to mentoring engineers and working across product, data science, and business teams in India, France, and the US\. I care about building an environment where good engineers do their best work\. Outside work I build The Index, a race\-data platform that normalizes results from 15 timing sources into a canonical dataset of 4\.2M results, with an athlete entity\-resolution layer that links results to real people across sources with no shared key\. It powers mytimes\.run, a public archive for the Indian running community, and RunWrap, an app for runners to analyze and reflect on their training\. It also produces original research: The Heat Tax \(https://geeksonfeet\.com/posts/heat\-tax\-warm\-race\-morning/\), with a few more in the works\. I work with AI daily, mostly on the systems side: LLM APIs, agentic development workflows, context engineering, and the guardrails that make agent\-written code safe to ship\. Java, TypeScript, Spring, React, Next\.js, Node, Postgres, Elasticsearch, AWS, Kubernetes\.

## Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

## AI stack

claude code

claude

## Work experience

Builder at mytimes\.run, Jan 2026 \- Aug 2026 · 8 mos, mytimes\.run is a public, non\-commercial archive of Indian race results, built so race data stays accessible and permanent for the running community\. • Built The Index, the data platform underneath: 15 timing sources normalized into a canonical dataset of 4\.2M results across 3\.6K events, over immutable raw, canonical, and derived storage so any parsing error is replayable rather than destructive\. • Built the athlete entity\-resolution layer that links results to real people across sources with no shared key, combining deterministic identifier clustering, verified finisher boards, and a probabilistic tier\. • Publish original research from the dataset\. First finding: The Heat Tax, on the cost of a warm race morning \(https://geeksonfeet\.com/posts/heat\-tax\-warm\-race\-morning/\)

Technical Director \(IC\) at Kayrros, Jul 2022 \- Aug 2026 · 4 yrs 2 mos, Lead engineering for the geospatial data platform behind 20\+ emissions, energy, and satellite\-analytics data products\. • Designed and built a geospatial asset\-discovery platform over 2\.7M\+ assets: interactive map UI with full\-text and faceted search and company\-asset relationships, rendering level\-of\-detail vector tiles for constant payload at any scale\. • Designed and built a micro\-frontend app platform \(single\-spa\) hosting geospatial data apps, with API\-based onboarding, per\-app backend proxying and centralized auth, so product teams build and deploy independently\. • Own an in\-house serverless compute platform running data\-science workloads as isolated, autoscaled Kubernetes jobs with DAG\-based orchestration, letting data scientists deploy custom processing without managing infrastructure\. • Set the engineering practices the team runs on: hiring, incident management, release process, and CI/CD\. • Hands\-on: architecture, design review, and code\.

Technical Architect at Kayrros, Mar 2020 \- Jul 2022 · 2 yrs 5 mos, Founding engineer of the Kayrros India office\. Helped grow the team from zero and established how it worked\. • Own the production serving layer \(dashboards and APIs\) for 20\+ data products on AWS \(EKS, OpenSearch, S3\)\. • Built out the India engineering team alongside the founding group, including hiring and onboarding\. • Scaled APIs and infrastructure to 1M\+ requests/day

Senior Software Engineer at PayPal, Dec 2018 \- Mar 2020 · 1 yr 4 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, • Refund Workflow: streamlined refund workflow, cutting processing time and improving visibility into transaction charges and fees\. • Merchant Activities Search: built full\-text and federated search across domains, giving global merchants faster and more relevant access to operational and transactional data\.

Principal Software Engineer at Symantec, Oct 2017 \- Dec 2018 · 1 yr 3 mos, Bengaluru Area, India, • RiskInsight: led end\-to\-end development of the web application, including interactive dashboards, exploratory views, and dynamic PDF reporting for enterprise cybersecurity risk analysis\. • ETL pipeline for telemetry data: owned design and development of critical ETL components transforming terabytes of raw telemetry into structured, analytics\-ready formats powering the RiskInsight platform\.

Senior Software Engineer at Symantec, Jul 2015 \- Oct 2017 · 2 yrs 4 mos, Bangalore

Research Fellow at SAP, Jul 2013 \- Jul 2014 · 1 yr 1 mo, Potsdam, Benchmarked SAP HANA on Integer Linear Programming workloads using bin\-packing as a test case\. Results presented as a poster at a Performance Engineering conference in Prague\.

Senior Software Developer at SAP, Jan 2011 \- Jun 2015 · 4 yrs 6 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area, • Technology Innovation Platform \(TIP\): strategic prototypes on SAP HANA, including SAP Health Central, a platform for government\-led healthcare outreach using in\-memory data processing and analytics\. • Advanced Planning and Optimization \(APO\): SAP's Supply Chain Management suite, focused on Production Planning heuristics to optimize manufacturing workflows and planning accuracy for enterprise clients\.

Software Developer at SAP, 2009 \- 2011 · 2 yrs

## Education

M\.Tech, IT, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore

BE, Telecommunications Engineering, PES University

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

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