Vishal Swami

Staff Software Engineer — technical anchor of Careem's subscription program from inception to 600K+ members across four markets (90% renewal). I owned the architecture and set technical direction for the platform end to end.

• Set the architecture for the whole platform — event-driven on AWS (DynamoDB, Kafka, event sourcing, CQRS) — with domain boundaries clean enough that Rides, Payments, Benefits, and Settlements could each integrate without breaking each other. That foundation still runs the business.

• Made the call to rip out a 3-year-old renewal system coupled to Payments and rebuild it cycle-based, so Product and Ops could change renewal policy with zero engineering involvement afterward.

• Designed the one-click subscription-and-benefits architecture across 5 domains after the team had concluded it couldn't be done; it became the company-wide technical standard.

• Co-designed the payment-retry architecture that took Payment Success Rate to 91%, the highest in MENA.

• Set the direction for the team's AI adoption — defined where agents and LLM tooling fit, then shipped an Ops chatbot that replaced a planned CMS project and an internal LangChain/LangGraph agent platform other teams build on.

• Grew and mentored 14 engineers while staying hands-on in architecture and code — I lead by being technically right, not just by managing.

Tech Lead — first engineer after the CTO at Clix, a digital-lending startup built on a legacy GE Money business. I set the entire technical direction and built the platform and engineering capability from nothing.

• Owned the architecture from zero, and made the foundational call to rebuild a legacy SOA + enterprise-service-bus stack as microservices while keeping live loan products running.

• Designed the loan decisioning engine that cut small-ticket loan decisions from over a day to under 10 minutes — a configuration-driven engine (Couchbase) integrating credit bureau, KYC, and bank-statement analysis, where new loan products launched with zero engineering deployment. It ran the company's lending for years after I left and was extended to new workflows without me — the real test of an architecture.

• Set infrastructure direction: led the move to AWS under RBI data-residency constraints, and replaced third-party tooling with in-house OAuth/JWT auth and AES-encrypted document storage.

Senior Software Engineer (acting tech lead) — on a 25-engineer team building Paytm's wallet and mobile-banking products during the post-demonetisation surge, I led architecture and design on the hardest flows under national-scale load.

• Owned the architecture for the integration with India's central government CKYC system at ~300 sustained requests/second — the hard part wasn't the code, it was designing a system that stayed reliable against a rate-limited government API. Built Kafka-buffered ingestion to absorb spikes, an ACL layer isolating Paytm's model from the government contract, and the SFTP exchange layer the spec demanded.

• Diagnosed and replaced a failing third-party document-management tool — recurring stuck/inaccessible documents were an operational liability — with an in-house system on AWS S3 that gave operations a maintainable foundation.

• Was the senior technical voice on complex payment and onboarding flows, and mentored engineers who've since reached Staff level.