9+ years building the systems other people depend on.

I am a Senior Software Engineer in New Delhi. I build on the MERN stack and Next.js, add Generative AI where it earns its place, and I have spent most of my career inside production systems with real users attached to them. Right now that means editorial AI tooling and election-night dashboards at India Today Group — and four products of my own that I run end to end.

9+ yrs

In production

Millions

Daily users served

17+

Products shipped

Products I own

New Delhi, 2025. Building editorial AI tooling at India Today Group.

Currently

India Today Group | Aaj Tak

Sr Software Engineer

Full career history

How it started

I started in December 2016 at a Delhi advertising agency, writing PHP and MySQL for an e-commerce build and an internal lead tracker. It was unglamorous work with a useful lesson attached: software is only finished when somebody else can operate it without calling you.

Within a year I moved to Instant Systems Inc, a product incubator, and spent nearly eight years embedded with its portfolio companies — adtech at Ceekr, retail-media analytics at SYNQY Corporation, real-time video at Humanize, and clinical software at Clove Dental. Four industries, one constant: production systems with real users attached to them.

What I do now

Since May 2025 I have been a Senior Software Engineer at India Today Group — the publisher behind Aaj Tak and India Today — building on the MERN stack and on Generative AI across editorial and digital platforms — article generation, AI summaries, semantic search with OpenAI and LangChain, plus reusable components for editorial tooling, election dashboards and the video CMS.

The election dashboard is the piece I point at when someone asks what scale means in practice: millions of daily users through results night, fed by a Node ingestion pipeline over Redis pub/sub and served as server-sent events through the CDN.

The products I own

Alongside full-time work I build and run four of my own products. PlanToday.in is an AI-powered wedding and event vendor marketplace, where hosts search in plain English or Hinglish and an NLP parser turns that into a budget-aware vendor query. TrendMeToday.com is a real-time trend intelligence platform that clusters publisher coverage and scores each story 0–100 on measured momentum. VTechXHub.com is an SEO-driven content publishing platform, and Think4BuySale is a real-estate marketplace currently running on its development build.

On both I own product, architecture, engineering and SEO. Running something end to end changes how you write code: you stop optimising for the pull request and start optimising for the invoice, the crawl budget and the on-call pager.

How I work

I prefer boring architecture with sharp edges removed: clear service boundaries, typed contracts, caching with explicit invalidation, and observability wired in before launch rather than after the first incident. I would rather ship a small correct thing this week than a large hopeful thing next quarter.

I also mentor. At India Today I run reviews with junior engineers on performance, accessibility and secure development — partly because it makes the codebase better, mostly because someone did the same for me in 2017.

How I think about the work

Four rules I actually follow.

Measure before you claim

Every claim on this site maps to something I actually built and can walk you through — the architecture, the trade-offs, and what broke on the way.

Own the whole path

Product, schema, API, front end, SEO and deployment. Knowing the whole path is what lets you cut the right corner under a deadline.

Write for the next engineer

Readable beats clever. The person maintaining this in two years is usually you, with none of the context you have today.

Ship, then instrument

Launch small, watch real traffic, and let the metrics decide the next iteration instead of the loudest opinion in the room.

Capabilities

What I actually work with.

Front end

React.js · Next.js · TypeScript · JavaScript (ES6+) · Angular · Redux / Saga · Tailwind CSS · HTML5 & CSS3

Component architecture that survives a growing team: typed props, isolated state, code-split routes, and Core Web Vitals treated as a build-time budget rather than a post-launch clean-up.

Back end

Node.js · Express.js · NestJS · REST APIs · Serverless · Microservices · WebSocket & SSE · PHP

Services split along business seams, not technical ones. Idempotent write paths, queue-backed background work, and streaming transports (SSE and WebSocket) where polling would fall over.

Data

MongoDB (incl. Atlas Vector Search) · MySQL · DynamoDB · Redis · aggregation pipelines · caching strategy

Schema design driven by read patterns, aggregation pipelines instead of application-side joins, and a cache layer with explicit invalidation rules rather than hopeful TTLs.

AI engineering

OpenAI / GPT · LangChain · RAG pipelines · embeddings & semantic search · content and voice automation

Retrieval-augmented generation built on real evaluation: chunking tuned to the corpus, vector search over MongoDB Atlas, guardrails on output, and a human review step wherever the output is published.

Cloud & delivery

AWS (Solutions Architect Associate coursework) · Docker · CI/CD · Git · Linux · Agile / Scrum

AWS-certified architecture with containerised services, pipeline-gated deploys, and observability wired in before launch — logs, metrics and alerts that name the failing component.

Education & certification