Nikhil Ponduri
Engineering Manager
Hyderabad
Summary
Head of Engineering with proven experience in scaling engineering organizations, driving product innovation, and building high-performance teams. Currently leading 28 engineers at SurveySparrow, where I’ve played a pivotal role in scaling the platform to $1M+ ARR and enabling continued growth. Skilled at designing scalable system architectures, setting up engineering processes, and aligning technical execution with business goals. Hands-on expertise in distributed systems, database sharding, cloud infrastructure, and high-throughput data pipelines. Passionate about building resilient, efficient systems while mentoring engineers to achieve their full potential.
Overview
7
7
years of professional experience
Work History
Engineering Manager
SurveySparrow
06.2024 - Current
- Leading a team of 28 engineers, responsible for scaling the product, people development, and engineering processes.
- Achieved over 1 million in revenue, and contributed to sustained growth.
- Defined and implemented engineering processes, development workflows, and best practices to ensure high team productivity, and quality delivery.
- Collaborate closely with the product team to analyze requirements, break them down into development plans, and design technical solutions.
- Responsible for infrastructure setup, monitoring, performance tuning, and ensuring system reliability.
- Drive continuous improvements in development practices, code reviews, CI/CD, and release management to optimize speed and stability.
Associate Technical Architect
SurveySparrow
06.2023 - 06.2024
- Designed and implemented the engineering infrastructure, including databases, architecture, and data flow, ensuring seamless operations and scalability.
- First engineer on the team — set up the foundation for the entire codebase, including backend pipelines, database architecture, and frontend systems.
- Established CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and deployment workflows to accelerate releases and improve reliability.
- Collaborated closely with management to bring in innovative ideas, enhancing product features, and improving overall user experience.
Lead Product Developer
SurveySparrow
06.2022 - 06.2023
- Working closely with the management and bringing in ideas to effectively manage the releases and teams
- Re-architectured complete survey end user form to handle burst amount of load and throughput and improved the response time by 50%
- Re-architectured reports and elastic sync pipelines to handle high workloads
- Brought in Queues and Cassandra to handle the high amount of submissions throughput and to prevent data loss and facilitated horizontal scaling
- Implemented Database sharding to facilitate horizontal scaling of the system
Senior Product Developer
SurveySparrow
06.2021 - 06.2022
- Upgraded Node Version from 10 to 14
- Developed Case Management and RateTheMeeting modules from scratch within a short period of time
- Took complete responsibility for the 360 module after its initial release as a beta version and made it a completely stable product
Product Developer
SurveySparrow
06.2020 - 06.2021
- Moved application logs from the database to Elasticsearch and implemented audit logs to capture all events by a user in the system
- Implemented Slack Share, Team Share, Portal Share, and various enhancements to Email and SMS shares.
Education
Bachelor's - Computer Science
St.Mary's Group Of Institutions
Hyderabad 04.2001 -
Skills
Leadership & Strategy: Engineering management, process design, roadmap planning, scaling teams
Technical Expertise: Distributed systems, database sharding, queues, ElasticSearch, Cassandra
Languages & Frameworks: JavaScript, Nodejs, Reactjs, Go
Databases: PostgreSQL, Cassandra, ElasticSearch
Awards
Cruising and Crushing it - February 2023: Honoured for being the best team player and for passion to go above and beyond, Cruising and Crushing it - November 2021: Honoured for being the best team player and for passion to go above and beyond
Timeline
Engineering Manager
SurveySparrow
06.2024 - Current
Associate Technical Architect
SurveySparrow
06.2023 - 06.2024
Lead Product Developer
SurveySparrow
06.2022 - 06.2023
Senior Product Developer
SurveySparrow
06.2021 - 06.2022
Product Developer
SurveySparrow
06.2020 - 06.2021
Bachelor's - Computer Science
St.Mary's Group Of Institutions
04.2001 -