---
title: "Kunal Kakade - Founding Engineer in India | Tal"
description: "Meet Kunal Kakade, Founding Engineer at Kitt | Full-Stack & AI Engineer | Next.js, React Native, Node.js, AWS | Travel Tech based in India. AI stack includes antigravity, codex, and cursor. Explore public work links including github."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/kunal-kakade/share-image"
---

# Kunal Kakade on Tal

## 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

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

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