Engineering Manager (Backend) at Head Digital Works Pvt. Ltd. (A23 Games) (2022-04 – Present)
IC role 2017–2021, EM role 2022–present
- Manage a team of 12 backend engineers (L1–L6) across four product lines: onboarding, wallet, gaming, and affiliate. Grew the team from 4 since taking over as EM in 2022, running the hiring loop end-to-end including sourcing, screens, and panel design.
- Run sprint planning, weekly 1:1s, and quarterly OKR cycles. Set up an L1–L6 career growth ladder that matches how we actually promote, not just how HR wants it documented.
- Own the oncall rotation and RCAs for the wallet and KYC paths.
- Own the backend serving A23's 70M registered users — roughly 300K daily logins and 25K signups. The system handles occasional 4–5x traffic spikes without manual scaling intervention.
- Led an AWS cost program over ~6 months across ECS, DynamoDB, Lambda, and S3. Biggest wins came from ECS task rightsizing, moving cold S3 to Intelligent-Tiering, and fixing a DynamoDB hot-partition that was burning on-demand spend. Annualised savings around $1M on a $1.8M–$2M bill; p99 latencies on the wallet path held steady.
- Integrated poker into the A23 app, including the wallet and reconciliation layer that keeps real-money flows consistent across the two product lines. Day-end reconciliation now runs without manual intervention.
- Built the KYC pipeline (~25K verifications/day) integrating Hyperverge, Signzy, IDfy, and Onfido for PAN and Aadhaar verification. Async architecture so onboarding never blocks on third-party latency.
- Built the live scoring engine for fantasy cricket on Lambda + EMR. Ingests ball-by-ball data from Sportz Interactive and Opta Sports and fans updates out to user leaderboards.
- Built an in-house LLM support assistant that handles ~60% of inbound customer queries before they reach the support team. RAG pipeline on LangChain with pgvector for vector search and OpenAI models for generation, grounded in the player's wallet ledger and recent gameplay.
- Built the in-house affiliate management system, replacing a third-party SaaS. Covers referral tracking, payout reconciliation, and attribution. Got us off the vendor contract and cut the recurring SaaS line item.
- Contributed to frontend development using React, building internal dashboards and lightweight web UIs for affiliate management and operational tooling.
- Developed and shipped Android features for the A23 mobile app, collaborating with product and mobile teams on wallet flows and onboarding screens.
IC role at Head Digital Works Pvt. Ltd. (A23 Games) (2017-04 – 2021-12)
Web Developer (2016-10 – 2017-04)
- Built backend APIs and responsive web apps for clients in e-commerce and agri-tech.
Node.js Developer (Intern) (2015-12 – 2016-10)
- Wrote Node.js backend services and REST APIs for client business applications.
