Shashank Gautam

CTO

Bangalore, Karnataka, India15 yrs 2 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Led 80+ engineers across multiple high-impact platforms.
Expert in building high-availability and scalable backend systems.
Passionate about driving innovation and team empowerment.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Backend-heavy Fintech leader with extensive experience in high-availability systems.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

LeadershipTechnical LeadershipBackend ServicesUser PersonalizationUser Authentication

Other Skills

People ManagementHBaseGraph StorageReal-time Query PlatformHadoopPlatform ManagementStrategic PlanningJavaDockerAerospikeLinuxJavaScriptJUnitXMLApache ZooKeeper

About

Head of Engineering at PhonePe with 15+ years in tech and 8+ years leading engineering orgs, including senior managers and cross-functional teams. I currently lead 80+ engineers across Platform as a Service (PaaS), Trust & Safety, and Knowledge Platforms—powering scale, reliability, and safety for one of India’s largest digital ecosystems. I specialize in building high-availability platforms and scalable backend systems from the ground up. My focus areas include org design, product roadmapping, engineering excellence, and execution at scale. Passionate about building empowered teams, driving innovation, and creating systems that deliver business impact.

Experience

15 yrs 2 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 6 mos

Average Tenure

8 yrs 2 mos

Current Experience

Phonepe

4 roles

Head of Engineering

Promoted

Jul 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 10 mos

Heading Engineering for Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Trust & Safety (TnS)
Engineering team size: ~80
Key Responsibilities:
Org Leadership: Built and scaled high-performing engineering teams across PaaS and TnS, driving a culture of ownership, innovation, and accountability.
Strategic Product Thinking: Defined and evolved product/tech roadmaps aligned with org
Technical Direction: Provided hands-on technical leadership, architecture oversight, and system design guidance to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance across platforms.
Engineering Excellence: Institutionalized robust engineering practices, including CI/CD, design reviews, observability, and operational readiness standards.
Execution & Delivery: Ensured timely, high-quality delivery of complex initiatives through streamlined planning, cross-functional alignment, and execution rigor.
People & Culture: Championed a growth-oriented culture through mentorship, career development frameworks, performance management, and inclusive org-wide processes.
Process Design: Designed and implemented scalable processes for campus hiring, onboarding, and team collaboration, enabling long-term velocity and resilience.

People ManagementLeadershipTechnical Leadership

Engineering Manager

Jul 2021 – Aug 2023 · 2 yrs 1 mo

Building Dev core platform
Helping Data Platform and Trust & Safety

Engineering Manager

Promoted

Jan 2020 – Jun 2021 · 1 yr 5 mos

Built Users chat and p2p transaction experience ecosystem
Peer to Peer payment experience services
Pub-sub platform built on top of HBase powering chat and other use cases
Chat related services, group creation, messaging, p2p and p2m chat support
User personalisation service empowering the click rates per widget on the mobile apps
Highly available backend services to empower mobile apps user functions

Senior Software Engineer

Feb 2018 – Jun 2020 · 2 yrs 4 mos

Built Users and P2P ecosystem -
User auth and onboarding workflows
Dynamic challenge-based authentication support
Graph storage and realtime query platform and change propagation
Chat platform and supporting services

Rivigo

Engineering Manager

Oct 2017 – Jan 2018 · 3 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Part of engineering leadership team at Bangalore office. Responsible for setting up a bangalore team along with zoom business vertical of org.

Ola (ani technologies pvt. ltd)

3 roles

Engineering Manager

Jan 2017 – Sep 2017 · 8 mos

Engineering leader of communication and marketing platform. I was responsible for a set of realtime performant tech and business critical micro-services along with a team of 17 software developers.

Software Developer 3 (Lead)

Promoted

Sep 2015 – Dec 2016 · 1 yr 3 mos

Member of data platform team. Contributed to Fabric - a realtime framework and services for data ingestion platform. Fabric is open-sourced on Ola's github handle. Worked extensively on Kafka, HBase and Hadoop infra.

Software Developer 2

Dec 2014 – Sep 2015 · 9 mos

Tech member of core platform team at Ola. Built softwares from scratch and worked on scaling problems extensively.

Hightail

Senior Software Development Engineer

Feb 2014 – Dec 2014 · 10 mos · Bangalore

Member of tech team at Bangalore office. Contributed to realtime virus scan and user systems.

Flipkart

Software(Automation) Engineer 2

Sep 2011 – Feb 2014 · 2 yrs 5 mos · Bangalore, India

Member of core supply chain platform and digital platform. Worked extensively on Performance engineering (building frameworks) and built core automation frameworks.