Onkar HoysalaHead of Engineering / CTO
About

I build small, densely talented AI-native teams, and the systems they run on, so they ship fast without breaking reliability. Sixteen years across consumer tech and SaaS, reporting to CEOs and founders. At Flash.co⁠ I run engineering and still build hands-on: scaled the product to ~1M MAU at 99.9% availability, held tech to ₹2 of ₹11 blended CAC, and shipped two pivots, the second in 6 weeks.

I believe AI compounds what's already good, so I start with the fundamentals: written thinking, design-first, good tests, simple systems, and space for good engineers 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 and AI strategy, architecture, budget, hiring and delivery. I present our product and engineering approach to investors, and stay hands-on across infra, agents and UI.

Strategy and unit economics

  • •Held tech at ₹2 of ₹11 blended CAC at ~1M MAU. Cut AWS spend 45% over 18 months across two pivots, and email cost per million emails by more than 70% while scaling from 50k to ~1.5M addresses.
  • •Kept infra and delivery deliberately simple so the team could spend its time building: moved from all-serverless to containers on ECS Fargate, with CI/CD on GitHub Actions. The setup has held up for 3.5 years and two pivots: 2-3 deploys per engineer a day, 8-10 min from merge to production behind feature flags, and 5-min rollbacks.

    • Platform and architecture

  • •Architected the self-healing agent platform behind 7.9K live ranked lists (217K products) in India and the US, at $0.94 per list. LLM-as-judge corrections alter 86% of builds before publish, and closed-loop supervisor fixes land 94.5% of the time.
  • •Agent stack: in-house harness → LangGraph → Mastra, with durable execution built on top (idempotent steps, heartbeat-based run ownership, orphan reclaim). ~320 runs recovered across redeploys.
  • •Took availability to 99.99% in 8-9 months at ~1M MAU and held it. 2 Sev0s in the last year, both from third-party outages.

    • Product

  • •Shipped two pivots: from an email and order-tracking app to tracking and research agents in ~4 months, then flash.co rebuilt as an agent-run marketplace in 6 weeks with 3 engineers.
  • •WhatsApp shopping agent, now in pilot as the main go-to-market channel. Founded the B2B arm, Buffy AI, an AI sales agent for Shopify stores; shut it down on unit economics after a 9-store launch.

    • Org and operating model

  • •Led a team of up to 21 engineers, including contractors, on an engineering budget held flat across four financial years, hiring for talent density over headcount.
  • •Replaced ceremony with written specs and design-first review: idea-to-POC from weeks to 1-2 days, and new hires in production in under a week. Led the AI-native setup across the org, with tooling, training and shared infrastructure for business teams.
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    Livspace, Director of Engineering
    Apr 2021 – Mar 2023

    Owned the pre-fulfilment domain (one half of the engineering team, ~50 engineers), 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. Grew my org from ~35 to ~50, halved time-to-offer, and got new engineers to their first production push in 2 weeks.
  • •Started and led the Livspace engineering blog (blog.livspace.io⁠).

    • 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 reporting, analytics and integrations.

  • •Built the end-to-end video tracking and analytics pipeline for VideoKen's AI Player: a lightweight, queue-based system that processed events within 2 seconds of arrival. Learning managers used it to see what worked and where viewers dropped off.
  • •Designed the integrations system that every partnership and third-party integration used.
  • •Built the stack to handle a production peak of ~3.5M API requests a day, with load tests benchmarked to 10M.
    • 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.
    • CSTEP, Research Associate
    Jul 2010 – Jan 2012
  • •Built simulation software across projects, such as a GIS-based disaster planning simulation for DRDO.
    • Education
    MS (by Research) in Information Technology, IIIT-Bangalore
    2014 – 2017
    B.E. in Computer Science, Visvesvaraya Technological University
    2006 – 2010
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