Headline

Co-Founder & CTO at Saafwater | IoT, Cloud & Full-Stack Engineer | IBM Call for Code Global Winner

About

I build things that run in the real world, hardware through to the interface. For five years, I've been co-founder and CTO of Saafwater. We put water quality sensors on public infrastructure across Goa: pump houses, tanks, treatment plants. I own the whole vertical, from ESP32 and Modbus firmware through MQTT pipelines and AWS to the React dashboards on top. The part I'm proudest of is the ML layer. Models that predict water quality and detect leaks, plus a state-wide supply model that takes live flow data and tank levels and physically actuates valves and pumps to move water where it's short. It runs in production for around 1.5 million people and 560 million litres a day, across 80+ devices in the field. We won IBM's Call for Code Global Challenge in 2021, the first Indian team to take the grand prize. Five years of hardware in the field teaches you that the real world doesn't care what you believed. A sensor in a roadside pump house finds every assumption you got wrong. The hard part was never the models, it was making them trustworthy enough that people would let them run. Before this I co-built CoronaTracker.in, one of India's earliest COVID trackers, ~19M visits at peak.

Location

Goa

AI stack

claude code

cursor

elevenlabs

glama

hermes agent

langchain

Work experience

Co-Founder & CTO at Saafwater, May 2021 - Present · 5 yrs 6 mos, Goa, India, Real-time water quality monitoring for ~1.5M people across Goa's supply network, handling 560M litres a day. Sensor firmware and integrations (ESP32, Arduino, Modbus, 4-20mA) with calibration, deployed across 80+ devices on public infrastructure: pump houses, tanks, treatment plants, industrial sites. MQTT data pipelines into a modular Docker microservices backend, split so client-to-server and server-to-hardware run independently and a single module can ship without restarting the system. The entire AWS infrastructure (EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, Amplify) as the team's only cloud engineer. Taught myself AWS and moved the company off IBM Cloud with a live zero-downtime migration, every device still publishing throughout. A cloud-agnostic deployment system: one script stands the full stack up on IBM, GCP or AWS, so we can always run on the cheapest infrastructure. Applied ML on live sensor streams: water quality prediction, leak detection, asset life forecasting. Plus a state-wide supply model that forecasts whether supply meets demand and physically actuates valves and pumps from live flow data and tank levels. Synthetic monitoring on Lambda where virtual hardware walks the entire pipeline every five minutes and alerts before a user notices anything is wrong. React, Next.js and TypeScript dashboards used by operators and government engineers. Won IBM's Call for Code Global Challenge 2021, the first Indian team to take the grand prize ($200K). Featured in PM Modi's Mann Ki Baat, invited by the Gates Foundation to Goalkeepers NYC, and spent three months in San Francisco on The Residency's Delta program.

Co-Founder at Paper House, Aug 2021 - Sep 2022 · 1 yr 2 mos, Goa, India, An NFT platform for researchers to mint, publish, and fund their research papers on-chain, and to discover others' work. Won the Filecoin prize, a $10K development grant, and a Portis Wallet prize.

Co-Founder at CoronaTracker.in, Feb 2020 - Oct 2021 · 1 yr 9 mos, Goa, India, One of India's earliest COVID-19 spread trackers, ~19M visits at peak. Built a geolocation feature showing distance to the nearest case

Co-Founder & CTO at Experiment 0, Jul 2019 - Aug 2021 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Goa, India, We study our atmosphere and find the effects of climate change in the air at coastal locations and also on its environment. We use this frequently updated study to take proactive steps to prevent or minimize it.

Co-Founder & CEO at The Unknown X, Sep 2017 - Mar 2020 · 2 yrs 7 mos, Goa, India, The Unknown X is an AI startup, providing cutting edge and industry-leading ML and DL solutions to B2B and local ventures

Education

Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering, Agnel Institute of Technology and Design

12, Technology and Business, Dr. K. B. Hedgewar Higher Secondary School

Public links

github: https://github.com/msanket9