I was the Co-founder & CTO at SmartPass (acquired), but I really am an engineer at heart. I love product engineering and hard technical problems equally. I'm traveling at the moment, but curious about what comes next.
I've done the zero-to-one as Co-founder and CTO, scaling both the product and the team behind it.
I find myself wanting to get back to hands-on IC work. 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 us $25 an hour.
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. We had no idea how to interview. We skimmed their portfolios and started contracts if they looked good.
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. I fixed bugs and shipped features between lectures. There was just no one else around to do it!
After graduating I moved to Santa Monica, CA. I worked at a 17-person startup called DoltHub building Dolt, the first version-controlled SQL database. Git for data, written in Go. I rewrote the CLI against a 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. I was especially grateful to work 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 grown SmartPass to $2M ARR, still nights and weekends. So I left DoltHub and went all-in. Customer growth outpaced the product, and we had to scale quickly to keep up.
The CTO title undersold how hands-on I was. Yes, I did manage and build the engineering team we never had. But I also architected and wrote the core of the platform: Go services on GCP, real-time WebSockets, an Angular and TypeScript frontend.
The outages started happening all at once when schools came back from summer break. We had grown 10x over a single summer, and the infrastructure at the time was built by teenagers.
The moment an outage hit, our support chat flooded: thousands of schools, millions of students and teachers locked out in the middle of the school day. All waiting for you to fix it. Outages taught me technical perseverance and resilience. Stressful as they were, I found joy in finding the exact problem, writing postmortems, and sharing findings.
We gradually built up our SRE practice. Proactive monitoring, alerting, and on-call rotations.
In Dec 2024, Raptor Technologies acquired SmartPass. I co-ran the exit with my co-founder: the banker process, the management meetings, the technical diligence, all while keeping the company running. I switched into a Staff Engineer role to bring the two platforms together.
I led the integration as both tech lead and PM, right as Claude Code shipped and Opus 4.5 launched. One week I was hunting for tooling to answer questions about large monorepos and came up empty. A few weeks later I was pointing Claude Code at the codebases and letting it do the searching.
I'm looking for hands-on product engineering on a technically meaty, mission-driven product. If that sounds like your team, I'd love to hear from you.