---
title: "Sridhar Kalla - Head of Engineering / Engineering Manager in Greater Hyderabad Area | Tal"
description: "Meet Sridhar Kalla, 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 based in Greater Hyderabad Area. AI stack includes claude code, codex, and kiro..."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/sridhar-kalla/share-image"
---

# Sridhar Kalla on Tal

## 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

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

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