Headline

Senior Leader | Dailyhunt & Magzter | Building & Leading Lean, Agile Teams Powering India’s #1 News App for 350M+ Users | Driving Product Innovation, Scale & Efficiency | Ex-Sun Microsystems

About

I scale consumer platforms to hundreds of millions of users, and put as much effort into growing the engineers who run them. Twenty years in engineering, fifteen at VerSe Innovation, where I joined as a technical lead and have grown to Senior Director of Engineering. Every step up meant a different problem space, not more of the same: mobile VAS, carrier billing, the Dailyhunt feed and backend platform, and now Magzter's backend platform alongside it. Starting over in an unfamiliar domain has been the pattern, not the exception. Today my teams run nearly all the serving-side platform services behind Dailyhunt — India's #1 news platform — and Magzter, plus the data platform and product delivery. Applied AI is a shared charter I help drive. I lead through engineering leaders and architects, several of whom grew into those roles on the team. I picked up the Dailyhunt feed in 2017 — a handful of engineers, a narrower charter than I had. I took it because it was the hardest problem in the building, and that's still how I choose what to work on. It went from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of monthly users while I had it. Holding personalized recommendations to a few hundred milliseconds through election result days, IPL finals and notification bursts is a different craft from building the thing. Ranking is where I learned to distrust my instincts. The models came from our Data Science team; my teams built and ran the personalization platform underneath, and the two worked as one loop — signals in, experiment out, next model. We widened the signal surface far past where it started and got used to the numbers overruling whatever we'd been sure of that week. The cost work came later, with our CFO on a company-wide mandate: monthly cloud spend cut by roughly half, with no loss of scale or reliability. No single lever did it — CDN and network egress, storage tiered against real IOPS, rightsizing, a stack modernized on reactive Java, GraalVM native builds and Golang so services scale up and back down cheaply, and a willingness to retire what we'd outgrown. My teams have taken LLMs into production for classification, summarization and notification titles, and rebuilt search on a vector store as system of record, so retrieval runs on meaning, not keyword match. The part I'd point to first, though, is the people — charters absorbed and staffed from inside the team, engineers who took on more scope than they'd held and grew into it. Working on a hard problem in scale, platform or applied AI? I'd like to hear about it!

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

codex

cursor

ollama

OpenAI Agents SDK

Qdrant

Work experience

Senior Director Of Engineering at VerSe Innovation, Oct 2021 - Sep 2026 · 4 y 11 mo, Bangalore, Scope: Owned a portfolio spanning Dailyhunt backend and notifications platforms, Magzter backend platform and engineering tools, and applied AI across both products, with oversight of the data charter across Dailyhunt and Magzter. Accountable for technical direction, reliability, operating efficiency and execution across multiple charters through senior engineering leaders. Key Impact • Partnered with the CFO on a company-wide cost mandate and cut monthly infrastructure spend 49%, from ₹45 million to ₹23 million, creating approximately ₹260 million in annualized savings without compromising scale or reliability. • Set the engineering agenda as Dailyhunt matured beyond 350 million MAU, shifting the mandate toward efficiency, recommendation quality and new revenue initiatives including Dailyhunt Premium and a short-stories format for tier-one audiences. • Moved applied AI from evaluation to production for content classification, story summarization and notification titles; made Qdrant the AI-search system of record and retired the legacy Elasticsearch stack and its cost. • Sustained millisecond latency above 50,000 requests per second during election, IPL and notification spikes; introduced Go services and GraalVM native builds that reduced compute cost by more than 30%. • Led platform modernization across Dailyhunt and Magzter, standardizing shared libraries, resilience and observability while integrating Magzter's premium catalog into Dailyhunt Premium. • Directed build-vs-buy and technology investment decisions across Dailyhunt and Magzter, including securing CFO funding for developer AI tooling. • Built leadership depth by coaching managers and senior engineers into broader ownership, delegating critical platform charters and establishing succession coverage to sustain execution through organizational change.

Director of Engineering at VerSe Innovation, Apr 2019 - Sep 2021 · 2 y 5 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Scope: Owned the Dailyhunt feed platform, personalization and native-app API gateway, sharing product direction with Product. Key Impact • Scaled the personalized For You feed from approximately 80 million to 300 million monthly active users, operating to internal latency targets of p95 below 300 ms and p99 below 400 ms. • Guided ranking strategy and execution that increased time spent per user by 35% while holding click-through rate and retention. • Led the GCP migration of more than 40 services across cross-functional teams, replacing capex-bound, oversubscribed virtual-machine environments that caused unpredictable latency. • Led multi-armed bandit experimentation supporting approximately three live feed experiments per week, using metric-driven results to adopt successful changes and discard or iterate on underperforming variants. Expanded content selection & ranking strategies from four to approximately 200+. • Increased test coverage from 35% to 75% within 12 months through static analysis, coverage baselines and a merge gate.

Senior Engineering Manager at VerSe Innovation, Jun 2016 - Mar 2019 · 2 y 9 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Scope: Led engineering and product for carrier billing, then expanded ownership to Dailyhunt notifications, base-gen and feed. • Automated notifications through a platform processing more than 250 million daily events and established the foundation for billions of push notifications. • Architected the first personalized For You feed with a three-person team, contributing hands-on code and sharing product direction with Product.

Engineering Manager at VerSe Innovation, Jul 2013 - May 2016 · 2 y 10 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, Scope: Led the 0-to-1 development and delivery of iPayy, a carrier-billing and merchant-payments platform, including product definition, architecture, team development and partner integrations. • Launched iPayy across all major Indian telecom operators, enabling merchant payments through subscribers' prepaid and postpaid accounts. • Built the team from three to nine, adding QA, technical leadership and architecture capabilities to support product delivery and carrier integrations. • Delivered merchant APIs and dashboards for payments, transactions, settlements and analytics, working directly with clients and carrier partners.

Technical Lead at VerSe Innovation, Jan 2011 - Jun 2013 · 2 y 5 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, • Built and productized news and content services over SMS and USSD, creating scalable, low-bandwidth mobile VAS and notification platforms that reached millions of users.

Member of Technical Staff at Sun Microsystems, Nov 2008 - Dec 2010 · 2 yrs 2 mos

Senior Software Engineer at GlobalLogic, Aug 2006 - Nov 2008 · 2 yrs 4 mos, Delivered enterprise case management software for financial institutions Single-Handedly developed the Network Analysis Module, enabling fraud detection workflows

Education

M.Sc, Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi

B.Sc. (H), Computer Science, Hansraj College