Onkar HoysalaEngineering Leadership
About

Engineering leader with 16 years of experience developing consumer tech and SaaS.

At Flash, I head engineering reporting to the CEO. AI-native development, sound fundamentals, and a focus on reliability are the core tenets I've led by here. Founded the B2B division and scaled the consumer product to ~1M MAU (2 Sev0s in 18 months), while cutting idea-to-production from weeks to days. Delivered this on flat budget over 3 years leveraging an AI-native engineering culture.

At Livspace, I led engineering for the entire pre-fulfilment domain, half of all engineering, responsible for everything up to order placement. My teams drove a ~20% reduction in CAC, a 17% increase in organic leads, and a 12% increase in conversion. My teams also led every international market launch, earning us a shared Founders' Award for one.

Skills
Engineering Management

Goals and OKRs, Team building, Delivery

Programming Languages

Python, Java, JavaScript

Application Frameworks

Springboot, Flask, Django

Monitoring

Grafana, OpenTelemetry, NewRelic, Sentry

Software Delivery

DevOps, CI/CD, Scrum/ Kanban

Databases

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch

Infra

Kubernetes, Serverless Computing, Terraform

Other

RabbitMQ, NodeJS, AngularJS, Ruby on Rails

Work Experience
Livspace
Director of Engineering
Apr 2021 – Mar 2023
  • •Part of the technology leadership. Responsible for organisation-wide engineering direction, delivery and team growth.
  • •Led the tech branding efforts⁠, hiring processes and development of growth charts.
  • •Rolled out documentation processes across Livspace using Backstage, and the adoption of SonarQube.
  • •Led the open-source program at Livspace, beginning with two projects in 2023.
  • •Built and grew the Growth and Sales engineering teams from the ground up over 3 years.
  • •Managed EMs and Staff Engineers. Drove the teams' roadmaps working alongside Product Directors.
  • •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.
  • •Key achievements include
  • •Started the Phantomworks team to improve UX for the designer-facing product, Canvas.
  • •Met the p99 availability SLO of 99.99% for team microservices and 99.999% for a few key services.
  • •Reduced infra and tooling costs of my teams by ~30%.
  • •Refactoring of key Java microservices to handle ~600 rps with <200ms p99 latency under stress, per Kubernetes pod, with no horizontal or vertical scaling. Benchmarked using k6.
  • •Improving load time of consumer webapp from 15s to 1s⁠ and scaling the demand generation tech stack to handle 3 million visitors a month.
  • •Led the development of an all-things-home superapp platform for various business verticals of Livspace; Fury, the landing page authoring tool; Quotes, a quotation generation tool; and Inkpot, a headless CMS for highly customized content generation.
  • •Tech: Microservices, AWS, Terraform, Java, Python
    • 1 / 2
    Principal Engineer
    Feb 2020 – Mar 2021
  • •Led the Customer Experience and Canvas (CRM) engineering teams.
    • 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.
  • •Designed the stack to handle >10 million API requests a day using DigitalOcean droplets and a load balancer, with production peak reaching ~3.5 million requests a day.
  • •Tech: Python, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, AngularJS, Redis
    • 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
  • •Co-founded the organisation. Responsible for fundraising, operational management, and stakeholder management.
  • •Developed simulation software for policy research. Clients include:
  • •Dept. of Science and Technology, Government of India
  • •Government of Karnataka
  • •TU Delft, Netherlands
  • •Tech: Java, Python, PHP, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Hibernate, PostGIS
    • 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.
  • •Tech: Java, JavaFX, QGIS, PostGIS, PostgreSQL, MySQL, JSP, PHP
    • Education
    MS (by Research) in Information Technology, IIIT-Bangalore
    2014 – 2017
    B.E in Computer Science, Visweswaraya Technological University
    2006 – 2010
    Additional Information
    Livspace

    2x Founder's Award recipient. Organised hackathons and engineering town halls.

    VideoKen

    Senior member of the core team. Mentored Masters thesis students.

    Fields of View

    Board Member, 2014-2016. Mentored thesis students from universities in Netherlands and India.

    Languages

    English, Kannada, Hindi

    2 / 2