Venkatesan V

Joined as one of the earliest engineers(Employee #45, under the first 15 engineers in the organization). Building and scaling a variety of products and platforms within razorpay - more specifically on the payment gateway, core razorpay platforms. Mentioning some of my key contributions below:

Technical:

• Architected and built up the first version of our data platform, which today is strong 20 member engineering team. Scaled and re-architected the data platform into a hybrid platform (data bricks for compute and notebooks, self hosted trino that acts as a unified query layer for all underlying data stores). This moves peta bytes of data every month from transactional systems.
• Architected and built our internal event gateway for handling all the clickstream data from frontend applications - mobile, checkout and dashboard. This roughly handles atleast a billion messages per day.
• Architected and built our gateway egress layer(code word: mozart) . This system is used as the only egress app for communicating with all the third party gateways and partners. Handles the entire core payment and payout processing that involves any communication with vendors and partners.
• Responsbile for introducing golang, as the standard backend language of choice. As part of our overall re-architecture effort, have built and scaled an "opinionated" razorpay specific in-source set of libraries and toolkits for powering and building micro services within the organization.
• Recent contributions around building and powering distributed tracing using open source technologies and associated contribution. Please refer to my blogs and presentations around the same.
• Building and powering devstack (github.com/razorpay/devstack) as the most preferred and powered open source dev tool for easy developer friendly platform.

Strategic:

• Reponsible for the overall architecture and delivery of the some of the key payment infrastructure pieces
• Working very closely between engineering, product, business and core infrastrcture teams to manage timelines, processes and effective functional delivery across all stakeholders.
• Been actively involved around yearly and quarterly technical planning, strategizing technology OKRs for the entire org and also striving towards its excellence and execution.
• Key stakeholder in working and formulating technology incident management decisions and also effectively driving RCA meetings to closure.
• Working with various vendors and partners in choosing the right frameworks for building the next set of scalable products.

Others:

• Been a core proponent of engineering branding within razorpay. Have reviewed, co-authored and written a bunch of blogs, presentations and active conferences.
• Worked at building a bunch of community meetups within razorpay - redis, golang, devops etc.
• Establishing industry connects with various industry veterans in helping them talk to razorpay engineering community.

• Built the engineering team from 1 engineer to a team of 8 engineers in a span of 10 months
• Conceptualized and launched a discovery driven personalized subscription program. This was a machine learning recommendation engine picks teas chosen to match user preferences using data science. A patent has is being filed on this
• Rebuilding the entire technology stack, architecture and implementation from grounds up - moving away from an expensive enterprise hosted model to a self hosted, highly available system.

• Built up the entire engineering team almost from grounds up. This was eventually composed of 20 engineers, 2 data scientists and a couple of analysts.
• Created many innovations and dents in the product roadmap and lifecycle. Was the first engineer to create many product features and innovations
• The product evolved from just being a web based offering to a full fledged stack of automated/semi-automated crawling, full stack NLP/ML technologies, powered by a web based front end system
• Provided initial architecture/design reviews/algorithmic improvements to many of the developements done at compile.
  As a co-founder, my role was a lot more broader than the above.
• Was involved in almost every stage of the product lifecycle and journey and other aspects around sales, marketing, HR, legal and operations, besides just technology.

• Part of the core team responsible for powering the e-commerce platform behind www.taggle.com
• End-to-End responsibility of product ownership, design, implementation of the payment infrastructure behind taggle
• There are multiple kinds of payments like buying a product, gifting a product, gifting cash, prepay into an individual's taggle account
• This was also combined with an extensive loyalty program, promotional coupons, referral programs among other goodies
• Involved in design and development of other features that are part of the day to day activities at taggle
• Focus on Caching, scaling and tuning multiple moving parts of the platform for better performance and scale.

• Responsible for Design and Development of a Web based Content Exchange Platform to allow partners to exchange content in a secure fashion
• Designed and Developed a Secure HTTP- Gateway [Exposed as a Web Service] that allows Yahoo Partners to organize their content into channels for classification and delivery into Yahoo! Network
• Responsible for Design and Development of a Feed Acquisition Platform [Web Based Hosted Application] to acquire feeds from multiple partners
• This is a “Hosted Platform” used as a de-facto platform by several Yahoo Verticals like Sports, Finance, News etc for gathering and displaying content from multiple partners
• Designed and developed several REST based Web Services that are internally and externally consumed by Yahoo verticals and Partners to manage and process their content
• Design and Development of a unified and consolidated FTP dropbox for all feed processing needs with unified authentication, partner management, storage and deployment.
• Was one of the initial engineers for the Hadoop platform. Was responsible for some of the initial design and implementation of some of the basic building blocks of hadoop.

• Development of Web Services Stack of Coldfusion Application Server v 7.1

• On Open Source deployment of an e-Office (Office on Web)
• Consultancy to Twice Digitale, Chennai to develop a simple Sales Force Automation and Tracking system
• Consultancy for BITSAA.ORG for development of Alumni Directory

• Led, Project IPv6@BITS, India, the first pseudo top-level aggregator (pTLA) for connectivity to 6-bone in India
• Developed Sammelan, the collaboration and multimedia content delivery tool for native IPv6 Internetworks (a patent was filed based on this work)
• Partnered and led European Commission’s Next Generation Network Initiative (NGNI) project on IPv6 QoS
• Started the Linux Apache MySQL and PHP (LAMP) interest group at BITS Pilani
• Led Project BITS-Linux for design and development of a secure & scalable edition of Linux Operating system for Enterprise requirements.

• Worked on Sales Force Automation using Fatwire Content Server Platform
• Worked on J2EE Platform (JSPs, Servlets and Java Beans) for developing a co-browsing facility used by Roaming Sales Team members
• Worked on JTAPI for sales call tracking, forwarding and management and integrating with LDAP based directory services