Headline

I build engineering orgs that move real money — and I’m making them AI-native | Head of Engineering | 20+ yrs | 10→40+ team | 100K txn/min | Production ML shipped | LangGraph · RAG · Spec-driven SDLC

About

I build and modernize engineering organizations on platforms where failure is expensive — real-money gaming and payments across 10+ regulated jurisdictions. Over 20+ years at Ivy Comptech / Entain, I progressed from systems analyst to Head of Engineering for the Hyderabad centre: a 40+ engineer organization spanning backend, platform, mobile, and QA — accountable for architecture, delivery, reliability, hiring, and engineering standards. Selected impact: • Scaled the engineering organization 10 → 40+; owned hiring, ramp, and progression for tech leads, senior engineers, and architects. • Led the Playtech ↔ Entain real-money wallet integration across Spain, France, and Italy — ~100K transactions/minute with idempotent settlement, dual-wallet ledger semantics, and zero-downtime live player migration. • Shipped ML in production: fraud detection (bot, collusion, AML) improved from 65% to ~95% accuracy (~89% reduction in fraud losses) without regressing real-time game throughput; casino personalization on AWS SageMaker (ALS, Optuna). • Scaled tournament infrastructure from 15K to 50K concurrent players; reduced AWS spend ~30% through capacity engineering. • Built the org's operating system: cross-functional squads (release cycles down 40–50%), observability and incident response (MTTD down ~60%). Where I'm going: the next generation of engineering organizations will be AI-native — spec-driven, with agents inside the delivery loop and evaluation as a first-class discipline. I'm building toward that hands-on, not from slides: • M.Tech in AI/ML (NLP specialization), BITS Pilani • GUARDIAN — five-agent responsible-gaming compliance system (LangGraph, NVIDIA NeMo, NIM, RAG, human-in-the-loop escalation), built for the NVIDIA India Agentic AI Hackathon • SectorSense — multi-agent market analysis system (LangGraph), M.Tech dissertation Open to Director of Engineering / Head of Engineering roles in payments, fintech, regulated platforms, and AI-enabled products — anywhere an engineering organization needs to scale, modernize, and adopt AI without breaking what already works.

Location

Greater Hyderabad Area

AI stack

claude code

codex

kiro

langchain

langgraph

PydanticAI

Work experience

Head of Engineering / Engineering Manager at Entain India, Feb 2020 - Present · 6 yrs 7 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, Led the Hyderabad engineering centre for Entain's global poker platform (PartyPoker, bwin), serving players across 10+ regulated European jurisdictions — 40+ engineers across backend, platform, mobile, and QA. • Scaled the organization from 10 to 40+ engineers; owned hiring, ramp, performance, and progression for tech leads, senior engineers, and architects. Restructured into cross-functional squads, cutting release cycles 40–50%. • Led the Playtech ↔ Entain real-money wallet integration (Spain, France, Italy): ~100K transactions/minute, idempotent settlement, dual-wallet ledger semantics, zero-downtime migration of live players. • Delivered production ML: fraud detection platform (bot detection, collusion analysis, AML monitoring) — accuracy from 65% to ~95%, ~89% reduction in fraud losses, no regression to real-time game throughput. Casino personalization: ALS collaborative filtering, Optuna optimization, SageMaker pipelines. • Scaled tournament infrastructure from 15K to 50K concurrent players through system redesign and performance engineering. • Expanded B2B footprint: DanskeSpil (Denmark) and PMU (France) integrations; iPoker network integration improving player liquidity across France and Spain. • Established end-to-end observability and incident response (AppDynamics, Kibana, centralized alerting, formalized on-call) — MTTD down ~60%. • Reduced AWS spend ~30% via right-sizing and capacity engineering; migrated mobile build infrastructure to Bitrise cloud CI/CD. • Introduced AI-assisted, spec-driven development practices; ran applied LLM and multi-agent workflow experiments (LangChain, LangGraph) inside the delivery organization.

Software Development Manager at Ivy, Mar 2017 - Jan 2020 · 2 yrs 11 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, First-line engineering leadership for poker platform teams — delivery ownership across multiple squads on a live real-money platform. • Led delivery of platform features and partner integrations across desktop, web, and mobile channels under regulatory release constraints. • Established the delivery discipline and team structures that became the foundation for the 2020–2026 centre scale-up.

Software Architect at Ivy, Mar 2014 - Mar 2017 · 3 yrs 1 mo, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, Platform architecture for high-availability, real-money gaming systems. • Owned architecture for distributed Java services handling peak tournament loads; performance engineering, capacity planning, and integration architecture for B2B partners. • Set architecture governance and review practices adopted across the Hyderabad centre.

Technical Project Lead at Ivy, Apr 2010 - Feb 2014 · 3 yrs 11 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, Progressed from Systems Analyst to Technical Project Lead on the same real-money gaming platform — building domain depth in payments, wallets, and gaming compliance that most engineering leaders only manage from a distance.

Project Lead Development at SEEC, Jun 2000 - Feb 2006 · 5 yrs 9 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Project Lead at SEEC, Jun 2000 - Jan 2006 · 5 yrs 8 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, Product engineering for SEEC Mosaic Studio — a legacy-modernization platform that mined and analyzed business rules for US financial services and insurance clients. Design, development, and client-facing delivery; mentored engineers on the product.

Education

Master of Technology - MTech, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, BITS Pilani Work Integrated Learning Programmes

Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, National Institute of Technology warangal

Public links

github: https://github.com/techkalia