Headline

Associate Director - Engineering@Shadowfax | Building dependable software | AI in engineering

About

I care more about how systems are designed than what they're built with: simple, dependable, and easy to change. Eleven years of backend systems, the last seven at Shadowfax, where I lead an 15+ engineer team on the platform behind order lifecycle, hub operations, partner integrations, and billing. The platform supports millions of shipments across first-mile, last-mile, reverse, and quick-commerce operations. I joined as a developer. Shadowfax went public earlier this year - been here through the early growth days to IPO. Order volumes have grown close to 100x since. I built parts of that platform from nothing and rebuilt others as they stopped holding, re-architecting each layer as it reached its limit rather than betting the company on one big rewrite. The newest of those is Shadowfax 360, our self-serve platform for small and D2C sellers, which I lead engineering for. Closely involved in architecture, code reviews, and production through every stage of the journey. I enjoy building systems that evolve with the business, helping teams make thoughtful engineering decisions, and balancing short-term delivery with long-term maintainability. Observability, monitoring, and what things cost to run get as much of my attention as the features. More recently, I've been focused on applying AI to engineering in practical ways, building internal tooling and production automations, helping teams adopt AI thoughtfully, and finding places where it genuinely improves the way engineers work. Before Shadowfax, I spent four years at UrbanPro building backend systems and APIs. Always happy to connect with people interested in engineering leadership, distributed systems, AI in engineering, or building dependable software.

Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

AI stack

claude code

codex

gemini

n8n

PydanticAI

Qwen

Work experience

Associate Director of Engineering at Shadowfax, Apr 2026 - Present · 5 mos, Joined as SDE2 in 2019, grew through SDE3, Tech Lead, and Senior Tech Lead to now leading engineering as Associate Director. Own the engineering team and the core e-commerce logistics platform, from architecture and code to production reliability and releases. Partner directly with the CTO and CPO on technical strategy, architecture direction, and engineering priorities. What we work on: - End-to-end order lifecycle - forward, reverse, and q-com flows across first-mile, mid-mile, and last-mile - Hub and warehouse operations - sorting, manifesting, reconciliation - E-commerce partner integrations - onboarding, order sync, real-time status updates - Rider operations - assignment, delivery workflows, and field communication systems - Client billing - wallet, prepaid payments, invoicing, and shipping rate management Some things I've been closely involved in: - Built core hub operations and rider workflow systems during the platform's early growth phase - Designed and shipped essential and time-sensitive features - Redesigning order and integration systems as the platform scaled - simplifying what had grown complex over time - Led the platform modernization programme - Migrating services from AWS to GCP - Setting up event-driven architectures for real-time partner integrations - Driving AI adoption across the team — an internal agentic platform (MCP-based tool access with auth and tenant isolation), production automations (error triage, AI email responder, code review pipelines), and helping teams upskill with AI - Standing up SLOs, and leading an early initiative on how AI can reshape the software development lifecycle itself On the process side: - Architecture and code reviews, production incident response - if something breaks, it's on us - Work with product and ops to scope and prioritise releases - Keeping the team unblocked and shipping consistently

Senior Tech Lead at Shadowfax, May 2023 - Apr 2026 · 3 yrs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Led the engineering team alongside hands-on development - owned architecture decisions, production reliability, and release planning across order management, hub operations, and partner integration systems.

Tech Lead at Shadowfax, Jul 2021 - Feb 2023 · 1 yr 8 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Moved from individual contributor to leading the team. Took ownership of architecture decisions, production reliability, and release planning alongside hands-on development.

SDE-3 at Shadowfax, Mar 2021 - Jun 2021 · 4 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Promoted based on platform contributions across order management and hub operations systems.

SDE-2 at Shadowfax, Oct 2019 - Mar 2021 · 1 yr 6 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Joined Shadowfax and started building core logistics systems - hub operations, rider workflows, COD reconciliation, and delivery flows during the early growth phase including COVID.

Senior Software Developer at UrbanPro.com, Apr 2018 - Oct 2019 · 1 yr 7 mos, On-site, Continuously work on various AWS Services(ec2, s3, rds, CloudFront) making website's architecture more scalable and reliable. Avoided numerous bugs by actively participating in the design phase of key projects. Designed and implemented scalable and efficient RESTful APIs for various projects which are consumed by both web and app platform.

Software Engineer at UrbanPro.com, Jul 2015 - Mar 2018 · 2 yrs 9 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area, Modified existing software to implement new features, upgrade interfaces and improve performance. Increased the website stability by reducing production error rate.

Internship at Infosys, Feb 2015 - May 2015 · 4 mos, India

Education

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.), Computer Science, jaypee institute of information technology

Public links

himanshugoyal.me: https://himanshugoyal.me/