Headline

Founding Engineer at Kitt | Full-Stack & AI Engineer | Next.js, React Native, Node.js, AWS | Travel Tech

About

Full-stack and AI engineer with 8+ years building production software. I was the first engineer at Kitt, where I built the corporate-travel platform from the first commit: Next.js web dashboard, React Native app, and Node.js/TypeScript services on AWS Lambda. I own architecture, infrastructure, and technical direction, and stay close to product and code. Kitt is live with AED 1.8M in confirmed bookings across flights and hotels. I built a unified booking API across Travelport, Gordian, and TravelFusion; multi-tenant organizations, travel policies, and approval workflows; conversational travel search; SQS booking pipelines; PDF e-ticketing; Stripe payments; and spend analytics. Previously at Fancraze, I cut MongoDB cost from $11,495 to $6,220 per month (~46%), built a leaderboard supporting 100K concurrent users, and shipped event-driven services on AWS Lambda. At Rakuten, I built search-platform features used across major Japanese e-commerce products. I also build AI and developer projects around agents, RAG, MCP, time-series models, and automation. Open-source work includes an Indian equities broker adapter for OpenAlice, a 5.7k-star AI trading agent, plus contributions to Kronos. Core stack: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, React, Next.js, React Native, Node.js, AWS, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, serverless systems, LLM applications, agents, RAG, and MCP.

Location

India

AI stack

antigravity

codex

cursor

Work experience

Founding Engineer at Kitt, Sep 2024 - Present · 2 yrs, Remote, Corporate-travel SaaS for booking and managing company flights, hotels, and cars with policy, approvals, and spend analytics built in. • Built platform from first commit: Next.js web dashboard, React Native (Expo) app, and Node.js/TypeScript services on AWS Lambda. Own architecture, infrastructure, and technical direction. • Platform has handled AED 1.8M in confirmed bookings: 467 flights (AED 1.54M) and 71 hotels (AED 267K). • Built one booking API across Travelport, Gordian, and TravelFusion for flights, hotels, and cars. • Built multi-tenant organizations, departments, cost centers, and users with travel policies and approval workflows. • Built conversational travel search with follow-up context, natural-language filters, and result ranking. • Built SQS async booking pipeline, PDF e-ticketing with Puppeteer/S3, SES email, Stripe payments, and MongoDB spend analytics.

Senior Software Engineer at FanCraze, Jul 2021 - Jul 2024 · 3 yrs 1 mo, Remote, ICC’s official cricket digital-collectibles platform with peer-to-peer marketplace, fantasy games, and fan utilities. • Cut MongoDB cost from $11,495 to $6,220 per month (~46%) by adding a Lambda proxy layer, enabling 16 clusters to move from M40 to M30 without losing throughput. • Built a live leaderboard supporting 100K concurrent users during major matches. • Built an event-driven system that issued personalized coupons in real time based on user activity. • Built core Node.js and Python services on AWS Lambda, including KYC, email notifications, player/teams, and CMS. • Moved secondary logs from CloudWatch to a self-hosted ELK stack to reduce logging costs.

Software Engineer at Rakuten, Oct 2017 - Jun 2021 · 3 yrs 9 mos, Search-platform team providing search-as-a-service across Rakuten Ichiba, Books, and other major products. • Built ZeroHit Resubmit, which retries empty searches with adjusted parameters so users receive relevant results instead of a blank page. • Built a tool that collects search metrics from multiple data sources and automatically generates the KPI matrix, replacing manual reporting. • Shipped features across the search stack using Java, Python, Django, React, Elasticsearch, Hive, and Hadoop.

Software Engineer at Rakuten, Oct 2017 - Jun 2021 · 3 yrs 9 mos

Advance Technelogy Intern at Druva data solutions pvt ltd, May 2016 - May 2016 · 1 mo, Pune/Pimpri-Chinchwad Area, A image classifier to classify weather the image is a scanned document or a personal image.It consist of a feed forward neural network which was build using pybrain .The web part was developed in bottle framework.

Education

Master's degree, Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

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

Public links

github: https://github.com/kunalkakade