Onkar HoysalaHead of Engineering/ CTO
About

I build small, densely talented AI native teams that ship fast without breaking reliability. Sixteen years across consumer tech and SaaS, reporting to CEOs and founders, owning tech and AI strategy, hiring, budget and delivery.

I have always stayed hands-on. I believe AI compounds what's already good, which is why I address the fundamentals first: written thinking, design-first, good tests, keeping things simple, and giving good engineers space to do great work.

Work Experience
Flash.co, Head of Engineering
May 2023 – Present

I run engineering end to end, reporting to the CEO: tech strategy, delivery, hiring, career development, budget. I present the product and our engineering approach to investors.

Have always stayed hands-on, and work as an IC across infra, agents, and UI; wrote Buffy AI and about a third of the second pivot.

Business Outcomes

  • •Held tech at ₹2 of ₹11 blended CAC at ~1M MAU. Drove AWS cost down 45% over 18 months as the product evolved.
  • •Scaled the consumer product to ~1M MAU. Took availability to 99.99% over 8-9 months and held it, in a move-fast pre-Series A environment. Only 2 Sev0s in the last year, both from third-party outages.

    • Product

  • •Built and shipped two product pivots. The first (shopping email and order tracking app to an order tracking agent + product research agent) took about 4 months. In the second, we rebuilt flash.co as an AI powered shopping destination, where every function of a traditional marketplace is performed by agents, in 6 weeks.
  • •Founded the B2B arm, Buffy AI, an AI sales agent for Shopify stores. It went live with 9 stores and led to a marginal increase in conversion, but did not make business sense, so we shut it down.

    • Team and Ways of Working

  • •Kept the engineering headcount budget constant across four financial years, focusing on dense tech talent rather than headcount. The team went from 13 to a peak of 15, and is at 8 today.
  • •Built light-weight processes focussed on written specs, design-first instead of only PR reviews. Idea-to-POC went from weeks to 1-2 days. New-hire production push in less than a week.
  • •Led the cross-org AI-native set up and took it past engineering. Built tooling for business and marketing, ran training, and set up shared infrastructure so the whole org could work this way.
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    Livspace, Director of Engineering
    Apr 2021 – Mar 2023

    Owned the pre-fulfilment domain (one half of the engineering team), leading EMs and Staff Engineers. Part of the technology leadership. 2x Founders Award recipient.

    Business Outcomes

  • •Developed products that led to ~20% reduction in CAC, 17% increase in organic leads, 12% increase in conversion, and 50% reduction in TAT for new country launches. For example, the all-things-home superapp; Fury, the landing page authoring tool; Quotes, a quotation generation tool; and Inkpot, a headless CMS for highly customized content generation.
  • •Owned the tech for international market launches.

    • Team

  • •Led engineering hiring: design, calibration, and career ladders. We halved time-to-offer, and new engineers hit first production push in 2 weeks.

    • Platform

  • •Met the p99 availability SLO of 99.99% for team microservices and 99.999% for a few key services. Refactored key Java microservices to handle ~600 rps with <200ms p99 latency under stress, per K8s pod, with no horizontal or vertical scaling. Benchmarked using k6.
  • •Improved load time of consumer webapp from 15s to 1s⁠ and scaled the demand generation tech stack to handle 3 million visitors a month.
    • Videoken, Lead Engineer
    Jul 2017 – Jan 2020
  • •Lead Full-stack Engineer for the reporting, analytics, and integrations dashboard.
  • •Developed the end-to-end tracking and analytics pipeline for VideoKen’s AI Player product.
  • •Built the stack to handle a production peak of ~3.5 million API requests a day, with load tests benchmarked to 10 million.
    • IIIT-Bangalore, Consultant
    Apr 2016 – Mar 2017
  • •Consulted with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy on an Open Information Systems project funded by IDRC.
    • Fields of View, Co-Founder
    Feb 2012 – Jun 2016
  • •One of four co-founders of a research company building simulation software for public policy, which continues to operate a decade after my tenure.
  • •Technical lead for software and research for about 70% of my time. The rest across grant funding, operations, and delivery including client interactions. Headed finance when I left.
  • •Raised research grants from the Government of India, NWO (Dutch Research Council, for a joint India–Netherlands project), and the Government of Karnataka, among others.
  • •Built and delivered simulation software to the Dept. of Science and Technology (GoI), Government of Karnataka, and TU Delft.

    • Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy

    Research Associate
    Jul 2010 – Jan 2012
  • •Responsible for software development and research of key projects such as ‘Disaster Management Simulation’, a GIS-based simulation for disaster planning for DRDO.
    • Education
    MS (by Research) in Information Technology, IIIT-Bangalore
    2014 – 2017
    B.E in Computer Science, Visweswaraya Technological University
    2006 – 2010
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