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Gaurav Shankar

Design & Architecture | B2B SaaS | Quick Commerce | GenAI | Engineering Lead | Ex-Freshworks

Bengaluru

9+ years of work experience

Zepto
Oct 202511 mosPresent

Building the engines behind Cart, Payments & Promotions at Zepto 🚀
Zepto
Oct 20241 yr 1 moOct 2025

• Led the 0->1 development of Zepto’s in-house, multi-tenant customer support platform, replacing third-party tooling and scaling it across multiple business-critical support workflows in a high-traffic B2C environment, built on Go, PostgreSQL, and event-driven architectures. • Designed and owned an AI-first, highly customizable chatbot platform, enabling product teams to independently experiment and ship support workflows; today automates 70%+ of incoming tickets, significantly reducing agent load and response times. • Scaled and operated the platform to handle ~500K tickets per day, supporting high-concurrency agent workflows, retries, and strict SLAs via idempotent APIs, message queues, and CDC-based data flows. • Led engineering readiness for peak traffic and event days, driving capacity planning, failure-mode analysis across databases, consumers, and downstream integrations to ensure stable operation under burst traffic. • Improved performance and cost efficiency through query optimisation, database failover tuning, and infrastructure right-sizing, reducing CPU utilisation and enabling safe downscaling with minimal production downtime.
Freshworks
Jul 20222 yrs 4 mosOct 2024

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Freshworks
Oct 20201 yr 10 mosJul 2022

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Freshworks
Aug 20191 yr 3 mosOct 2020

Greater Chennai Area

Fresh-marketer: A marketing automation tool At my current position, I'm working on building the Freshworks CRM platform. The current tech stack I'm working with includes, JAVA and Spring-boot framework, MySQL and ES for databases, Kafka for event streaming, and other similar techs. • Worked on Building different features for Marketing Email Campaigns And Marketing Journeys. • Implemented Role-Based Access Control for the whole Fresh-marketer product. • Work closely with Product Owners, QA and other teams in an agile environment to collaborate and influence new products • Performing code reviews and mentoring Interns. • Elevating Quality of engineering work
Tata Consultancy Services
Feb 20162 yrs 5 mosJun 2018

Bengaluru Area, India

Test Automation Engineer: Retail Team o Key member of a team working with Oracle Retail Applications, writing testing code for multiple Interfaces across systems integrated via Mulesoft using a BDD approach. o Key designer for the automation framework using Selenium web-driver with JAVA, Cucumber, Maven and TestNG. Also handled Data Migration testing.. o Went beyond my scope of work to gain hands-on experience of git and teamcity as a CI tool. o Presented the “On the Spot” Award for valuable contribution to the project. o Worked with API testing using swagger APIs o Gained experience of sql and NoSQL databases(Cosmos DB) Test Engineer: Project Lifecycle Management Team o Lead Test Engineer for the project that aimed to replace the existing PLM systems with a new one and it being directly integrated to the SAP via multiple Interfaces. o Carried out extensive operations on all aspects of the project i.e. analyzing user stories, writing business scenarios, test cases, test scripts, running system tests, and system integration tests, regression tests, identifying automation opportunities and logging and tracking defects to their closure. o Felicitated with “On the Spot” Award for outstanding contribution, above and beyond the expectations of the Project Management. o Was nominated twice and awarded once “Best Bug Award” for my findings. Test Automation Engineer: E2E Automation Team o Was one of the top five associates chosen for automation testing right out of the training program. o Successfully automated web-based applications and terminal emulators (Mainframes and Putty) using HP UFT tool and descriptive programming within two months into the project.

Gaurav’s AI Stack

claude
claude
deepseek
deepseek
gemini
gemini
openai
openai
claudecode
claudecode
ChatGPT
ChatGPT

Education

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Computer Science

Raipur Institute of Technology

20114 yrs2015

HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL CERTIFICATE EXAMINATION(12th)

AHLCON INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, NEW DELHI

20082 yrs2010

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Headline

Design & Architecture | B2B SaaS | Quick Commerce | GenAI | Engineering Lead | Ex-Freshworks

About

Staff Software Engineer with ~9 years of experience building and scaling backend systems across B2B SaaS and high-scale B2C platforms. Led the 0->1 development of Zepto’s multi-tenant, in-house customer support platform, replacing third-party infrastructure and scaling it across multiple support use cases, currently handling ~500K tickets/day. Strong background in distributed systems, production reliability, cost optimization, and driving cross-team technical initiatives. Previously built and scaled large-scale B2B SaaS systems at Freshworks.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude

deepseek

gemini

openai

claudecode

ChatGPT

Work experience

Staff Software Engineer at Zepto, Oct 2025 - Present · 11 mos, Building the engines behind Cart, Payments & Promotions at Zepto 🚀

Software Development Engineer 3 at Zepto, Oct 2024 - Oct 2025 · 1 yr 1 mo, • Led the 0->1 development of Zepto’s in-house, multi-tenant customer support platform, replacing third-party tooling and scaling it across multiple business-critical support workflows in a high-traffic B2C environment, built on Go, PostgreSQL, and event-driven architectures. • Designed and owned an AI-first, highly customizable chatbot platform, enabling product teams to independently experiment and ship support workflows; today automates 70%+ of incoming tickets, significantly reducing agent load and response times. • Scaled and operated the platform to handle ~500K tickets per day, supporting high-concurrency agent workflows, retries, and strict SLAs via idempotent APIs, message queues, and CDC-based data flows. • Led engineering readiness for peak traffic and event days, driving capacity planning, failure-mode analysis across databases, consumers, and downstream integrations to ensure stable operation under burst traffic. • Improved performance and cost efficiency through query optimisation, database failover tuning, and infrastructure right-sizing, reducing CPU utilisation and enabling safe downscaling with minimal production downtime.

Lead Software Engineer at Freshworks, Jul 2022 - Oct 2024 · 2 yrs 4 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Senior Backend Engineer at Freshworks, Oct 2020 - Jul 2022 · 1 yr 10 mos, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Backend Engineer at Freshworks, Aug 2019 - Oct 2020 · 1 yr 3 mos, Greater Chennai Area, Fresh-marketer: A marketing automation tool At my current position, I'm working on building the Freshworks CRM platform. The current tech stack I'm working with includes, JAVA and Spring-boot framework, MySQL and ES for databases, Kafka for event streaming, and other similar techs. • Worked on Building different features for Marketing Email Campaigns And Marketing Journeys. • Implemented Role-Based Access Control for the whole Fresh-marketer product. • Work closely with Product Owners, QA and other teams in an agile environment to collaborate and influence new products • Performing code reviews and mentoring Interns. • Elevating Quality of engineering work

QA Engineer at Tata Consultancy Services, Feb 2016 - Jun 2018 · 2 yrs 5 mos, Bengaluru Area, India, Test Automation Engineer: Retail Team o Key member of a team working with Oracle Retail Applications, writing testing code for multiple Interfaces across systems integrated via Mulesoft using a BDD approach. o Key designer for the automation framework using Selenium web-driver with JAVA, Cucumber, Maven and TestNG. Also handled Data Migration testing.. o Went beyond my scope of work to gain hands-on experience of git and teamcity as a CI tool. o Presented the “On the Spot” Award for valuable contribution to the project. o Worked with API testing using swagger APIs o Gained experience of sql and NoSQL databases(Cosmos DB) Test Engineer: Project Lifecycle Management Team o Lead Test Engineer for the project that aimed to replace the existing PLM systems with a new one and it being directly integrated to the SAP via multiple Interfaces. o Carried out extensive operations on all aspects of the project i.e. analyzing user stories, writing business scenarios, test cases, test scripts, running system tests, and system integration tests, regression tests, identifying automation opportunities and logging and tracking defects to their closure. o Felicitated with “On the Spot” Award for outstanding contribution, above and beyond the expectations of the Project Management. o Was nominated twice and awarded once “Best Bug Award” for my findings. Test Automation Engineer: E2E Automation Team o Was one of the top five associates chosen for automation testing right out of the training program. o Successfully automated web-based applications and terminal emulators (Mainframes and Putty) using HP UFT tool and descriptive programming within two months into the project.

Education

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Computer Science, Raipur Institute of Technology

HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL CERTIFICATE EXAMINATION(12th), AHLCON INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, NEW DELHI