Saarthak Vats

CTO

Dubai, United Arab Emirates18 yrs 11 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Led engineering transformation from monolith to microservices.
Built multi-country hybrid teams for fintech solutions.
Established continuous delivery culture in fast-paced environments.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech Engineering Leader with expertise in microservices architecture and team management.

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Skills

Core Skills

MicroservicesArchitectureEngineering LeadershipFintechProduct DevelopmentEngineering ManagementSoftware Engineering

Other Skills

AWSAgile MethodologiesAmazon Web Services (AWS)Apache KafkaApplication Programming InterfacesBusiness AnalysisCloud ComputingCommunicationContinuous DeliveryContinuous IntegrationCore BankingDatabase DesignDevOpsDistributed SystemsDocker

About

Engineering leader with strong hands-on experience in building tech products, engineering systems, processes and teams in startups/scale-ups. I strive for engineering excellence by fostering a high-performance culture. I bring strong biz/product acumen to establish engineering as core enabler to an organisation's success by architecting and leading to build and deliver at a fast pace, while remaining lean. I am an active India-focussed angel investor as well. I currently responsible for all things tech at noon's B2C fintech team. I built multi-country (India, SL, UAE) hybrid team, grounds up, establishing key capabilities of continuous delivery, microservices architecture and related practices, executing multi-DC deployment topology, automation testing establishment for backend and frontend, cybersecurity and audits. At peak, 45 team members were reporting to me. Previously at MobiKwik, as Engineering Manager, I launched two products - Bus Tickets booking and Hotels booking. I lead engineering transformation with - migration from monolith to microservices, containerised deployments, and automation testing practices for backend microservices. I evangelised many clean code practices within the team and encouraged several team members. When I left, I was leading 15 members across two product groups. Previous to that at Mettl, I played an instrumental role in building the platform which later on scaled to thousands of tests a day. I developed critical capabilities and focussed on strong design and architecture to meet the demands of growing platform.

Experience

Barq

Director of Technology

May 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 10 mos · Dubai, United Arab Emirates · Remote

I lead architecture team. I am responsible for spearheading complete design and architecture for the Barq platform. I report to CTO.
Things that I do -
Design, architect (microservices architecture) and supervise critical components - customer onboarding, authentication, wallet-accounting-ledger, payment services, gaming & loyalty, risk and compliances, business portal, payrolls etc. Mentored tech leads, senior engineers on design/architecture proposals, production incidents and development best practices.
Scalability and performance - enable rapid business with development of strategies/plans for high availability, resilience, performance etc balancing cost, operational ease,
Advisor to CTO - technical assessments, due-diligence, build vs buy decisions, building technical strategies, enhancement in process & practices
Engineering excellence - standardising development and testing conventions, processes for speed and quality, adoption of AI for SDLC
Compliances - as per PCI and SAMA (Saudi central bank) regulations
Tech stack - microservices, Java, Node (TypeScript), MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, Docker / K8s, Oracle Cloud, Python, Airflow

Technology ManagementCore BankingHigh Availability (HA)ResiliencyJavaNode.js+2

Noon

VP Engineering

Jan 2018 – Apr 2023 · 5 yrs 3 mos · Dubai

On a mission to build most loved e-wallet for middle east. Passionate about the future of fintech in MENA region.
Leadership stakeholder for strategic & tactical planning
Leading technology & product functions
Responsible for architecture, practices, processes, hiring, culture, mentorship etc
Led PCI-DSS, SAMA, UAECB, NESA audits and compliances
Built a complete platform from scratch and expanding to multiple data centres.
Built a complete India based team 40+ members (and growing, across UAE, IND, SL)
Establish a Continuous Delivery culture (through Scrum/Kanban/DevOps/SRE)
Working with hybrid teams across UAE, IND, SL to deliver biz/product roadmap
Tech Stack - microservices, Java, MySQL, Redis, Kafka, MongoDB, ELK, Docker, Kubernetes, Hybrid cloud

CommunicationTechnical LeadershipStrategic ThinkingReact.jsReact NativeKey Performance Indicators+3

Mobikwik

Engineering Manager

May 2015 – Dec 2017 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Gurgaon, India

Lead multiple teams (15 engineers - Dev, QA and support)
Complete technical, people and project ownership. Product stakeholder. Mostly worked on development, growth, scale, performance and stability.
1. Payments & Wallet team (May'15 - May'16)
2. Recharge & Utility Bill Payments (June'16 - present)
3. Bus Tickets booking (Apr'16 - Dec'17) - product launch and growth
4. Web/M-site platform team (Oct'16 - May'17)
5. Hotels Booking (Feb' 17 - Dec'17 ) - product launch and growth
Initiatives -
a. Devops - Introduced dockerized deployment and standardized common practice across all projects.
b. Product - Introduced product instrumentation practices and build in-house solution for product managers.
c. QA - simplified qa automation architecture and framework for backed services testing. Also implemented CI and maven integration with detailed reporting. Standardized this QA practice across all teams.
d. Architecture - lead core refactoring for journey towards microservices. We broke down the monolith, decoupled interdependent teams, and made releases flexible.
In the end of my tenure, I was leading 3 teams, with total 15 engineers (dev, qa, tech-support).
Tech Stack : Java, MySQL, Spring, Redis, AWS, Private Cloud, Kafka, Docker, Git, Maven.

CommunicationTechnical LeadershipStrategic ThinkingKey Performance IndicatorsContinuous IntegrationProduct Development+1

Mettl

2 roles

Team Lead

Aug 2014 – Apr 2015 · 8 mos

Roles and responsibilities –
1. Development
2. End-to-end release management process ownership
3. Performance tracking
4. Developing good engineering culture
Reporting to Head of Technology

CommunicationContinuous Integration

Sr Software Engineer

Aug 2010 – Aug 2014 · 4 yrs

Member of Core engineering team and a founding member of the technical team. Build the whole platform practically from scratch. Contributed as a full-stack engineer.
Features ownership (few mentioned) –
1. Test window - the web console where the assessment runs
2. Restructuring of Questions management, including data migration and data correction
3. APIs for third party integrations
4. User/access control management
5. Front end coding simulator
6. Web page proctoring
Additional Projects:
1. Architect QA automation framework on Selenium Web Driver.
2. Infra/devops work at different moments in AWS

Asp global works

Developer

May 2009 – Jan 2010 · 8 mos · New Delhi Area, India

Part of a startup founded by a friend, to provide software development service for Indian/US projects. We were three people team. I handled C#/.Net projects.
Role - development, testing, planning, management, coordination (with onsite client)
Projects:
Hargrove Exhibitor Services - online portal for a company which lets users order stuff/services to setup a stall in any event (such trade fair or book fair).
Website revamp
Develop new section for ordering, invoice generation
Techmatrix - Developing a new website for Ministry of Education, US
Developing product catalog search algorithm
Data migration and transformation