I was the Co-founder & CTO at SmartPass (acquired), but really a Staff Engineer at heart. I love product engineering and hard technical problems in equal measure. On a sabbatical now, looking for what's next.
I've done the zero-to-one as co-founder and CTO, scaling both the product and the team behind it.
Now I want to work on interesting technical problems, and find a mission worth solving hard problems for. I want to sharpen my raw technical and analytical skills and learn from people better than me.
The games on an iPhone 3GS left me in awe: I had to know how they were made. So at 13, in Bangalore, I signed up for 1:1 Objective-C tutoring. My first real app came from watching my parents write invoices by hand for their wholesale business; I built them scan4pase, an invoice generator.
Then I met Peter Luba in high school. Our district's grades portal logged you out every 15 minutes, so we scraped it with XPath and shipped Sapphire Access: the whole portal in an app, launched a week before finals with one tweet and posters off the library printer. 83 downloads on day one, 11,600 over its life, and $186 in ad revenue we never got around to splitting. The next thing we built together was SmartPass.
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iPod SmartPass began as Saturday mornings in our school's windowless TV studio: a handful of teenagers building a digital hall pass for an assistant principal who paid $25 an hour and brought the pizza. The first check was $140, from a school of 280 students.
I primarily built the iOS app. For everything else, web, backend, Android, we hired contractors off Upwork and managed them over Slack from seven time zones away, skimming portfolios instead of running interviews, because none of us had ever hired anyone.
When COVID sent Penn State remote, I took the semester off and did sales full-time: four to six demos a day from my college apartment, 270 demos and 62 schools by December. Then back to class, shipping features between lectures and fixing bugs from the back row, graduating in three years.
At DoltHub I worked on Dolt, the first version-controlled SQL database. Git for data, written in Go. For the 1.0 release I rewrote the CLI against the new storage engine, reimplementing diff and merge for tables, rows, and schema.
I left with a first-principles feel for how databases actually work, from storage format to query engine to wire protocol, working alongside senior ex-Snapchat engineers under Snapchat's founding-era VP of Engineering.
| student_id | pass_status | room | |
| - | 88412 | active | bathroom |
| + | 88412 | ended | bathroom |
| + | 90233 | active | library |
| + | 91077 | active | nurse |
By the end of 2022 we had bootstrapped SmartPass to $2M ARR, still nights and weekends. So we quit our jobs and went all-in: a single $2M seed from Reach Capital, then $10M ARR in under two years.
I was the CTO. I architected and wrote the core of the platform: Go services on GCP, real-time WebSockets, an Angular and TypeScript frontend. And I hired the EPD team we never had: 12 engineers, 3 designers, and a PM, hands-on in the codebase the entire way.
Traffic grew 60x on infrastructure we had partly written as teenagers. I built the SRE practice from nothing: monitoring and alerting from first principles, the on-call rotation, and one long night piecing a corrupted database back together, guessing whether it would hold when 30,000 students logged on at 8:45 the next morning.
It held. A 24/7 service that 2M students depend on does not forgive sloppiness: we ran 99.99% uptime, and once turned a principal's 8:00 a.m. bug report into a fix by 8:33. He called it the best support he'd ever had from a software company.
In 2024, Raptor Technologies acquired SmartPass. We'd taken it to $10M ARR and 2M daily users on a single $2M seed, and I co-ran the exit with my co-founder: the banker process, the management meetings, the technical diligence, all while keeping the platform running. Then I joined as a Staff Engineer to bring the two platforms together.
I led the integration as both tech lead and PM, deliberately pacing delivery to partner teams' real bandwidth to win genuine commitment: fewer engineering hours and lower opportunity cost, even when that meant a longer calendar.
I'm looking for hands-on product or infrastructure engineering on a technically meaty, mission-driven product. If that sounds like your team, I'd love to hear from you.