Bhagwati Malav

Director of Engineering

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India10 yrs 9 mos experience
Highly StableAI Enabled

Key Highlights

  • Expert in building scalable search and recommendation systems.
  • Proven track record in leading high-performing engineering teams.
  • Strong focus on AI-driven software development.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Backend-heavy Fullstack Engineer specializing in E-commerce and Fintech solutions.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Engineering ManagementSearch & DiscoverySearch & RecommendationSearch EngineeringSoftware Development

Other Skills

JavaC++ElasticsearchMicroservicesAINLPPythonDeep LearningSpringKafkaDjangoPostgresMongoDBJavaScriptSQL

About

https://bhagwatimalav.substack.com/ - Engineering Manager at Zepto, leading Search & Discovery systems at scale. - I focus on building high-performing engineering teams and durable platforms by aligning ownership, system-wide understanding, and long-term velocity. - I strongly believe in building hero teams, not hero engineers—great systems scale through collaboration, not individual brilliance. - Led the end-to-end buildout of teams, systems, and engineering culture multiple times at Zepto and Paytm, delivering scalable, high-impact platforms in high-growth environments. - Previously at Paytm, I led teams across Search, Chat, and Recommendation, building products end-to-end from scratch while evolving large, high-traffic platforms. - I’m excited by high-scale, high-impact problems that demand strong ownership, clear thinking, and thoughtful engineering leadership—especially where systems, teams, and business outcomes intersect.

Experience

10 yrs 9 mos
Total Experience
1 yr 6 mos
Average Tenure
1 yr 4 mos
Current Experience

Zepto

Engineering Manager

Jan 2025Present · 1 yr 4 mos · Bengaluru

  • MTTR < 3 min ( 45-60 mins - < 3 mins)
  • Lead Time for Changes- 2 days
  • Change Failure Rate-18%
  • Bus Factor 3-4
  • Team Building & Leadership (15+)
  • Built a motivated, resilient team from scratch by organizing engineers around purpose, mastery, ownership, and system-wide understanding, enabling everyone to work across all components of the search platform.
  • Introduced a 2-day deployment cadence that reduced burnout, Evolved from a structured 2-day deployment cadence to frequent, small-batch releases—driving significant improvements in quality at scale.
  • Driving the creation of an AI-first software development workflow, where AI generates the first iteration across every stage—PRD, TRD, code, and reviews—enabling faster iteration and higher developer leverage.
  • Drove a culture of mentorship and situational leadership, coaching through Maslow-style growth; promoted X engineers SDE1 → SDE2 and X SDE2 → SDE3 by strengthening accountability and craftsmanship.
  • Fostered decentralized ownership, empowering engineers with autonomy and full responsibility for their subsystems.
  • Engineering Impact
  • Rebuilt the re-ranking platform into a configurable system supporting 40+ ranking variations without code changes.
  • Designed a scalable query understanding layer supporting 100+ attributes, boosting relevance across product types.
  • Built the Search Debugger, offering one-view explainability and automating manual ops.
  • Re-architected candidate retrieval to support live vector search with dynamic lexical/vector switching based on runtime signals, to fetch explore products, optimising latency and infra cost.
  • Introduced ScyllaDB Feature Store and delivered its first production use case: a sub-ms ranking store ingesting multi-level signals (store-product, city-product, store-level, Query Level), powering 500K+ requests/min with high read/write throughput.
  • Ideated the Aisle Experience, dynamically constructing aisle tabs based on in-session user queries for contextual discovery.
JavaC++ElasticsearchMicroservicesAIEngineering Management+1

Paytm

3 roles

Engineering Manager/STL at Paytm Search, Chat & Recommendations)

Promoted

Apr 2023Jan 2025 · 1 yr 9 mos

  • Leading a team of 12-14 engineers, Building & leading multiple products in Search, Personalisation & Recommendation Space using NLP, LLM, AI.
  • Leadership :
  • Managed a team of 6–8 engineers, driving 1:1s, career growth,
  • coaching, and mentoring through situational leadership.
  • Focused on keeping the team motivated by fostering mastery, purpose,
  • and ownership.
  • Successfully built two products—Chat and Recommendation—end-to-end from scratch along with managing existing search platform.
  • Product :
  • Building Paytm Super App Search Assistant
  • (Supports vector search, api based retrieval, entity uid mapper, custom response mapper, text-to-sql)
  • Deployed LLAMA2, 3 as a service/platform for internal use cases. Explored vllm, text generation inference etc., overall designed compute, response optimised solution.
  • Built LLM + Deep Learning based multi lingual Intent Classification(70+ intents) and NER Detection for Indian Languages. Accuracy ~ 80% , 99th response time < 1 sec.
  • Extending existing Search platform to support Voice & Semantic search use cases.
  • Open Source LLAMA 2, LangChain, OpenAI, Transformers based models, BiLSTM, Multi Language Intent/NER handling, Transfer Learning & Fine Tuning.
  • Building next version of User Personalisation platform. (Contextual MAB)
  • Built a model to detect Indian languages from transliterated input. Accuracy ~ 80%
  • Built a model to detect Indian names based on search input.(at prefix level). Accuracy ~ 75 %
  • Built in-memory Low Latency Trie based spellchecker which gives suggestion at prefix level, also uses phonetic sound, performance metrics, keyboard distance to give spell suggestions.
  • 99.9 response < 20 ms
NLPAIJavaPythonSearch & Recommendation

Technical Lead - Paytm & ONDC Search

Apr 2022Mar 2023 · 11 mos

  • 6+ million search hits per day, 150+ million monthly active users, 20+ million merchants.
  • Leading a team of 6-8 engineers, and building multiple Search Products( ONDC Search, Federated Search Platform, Location Aware Search, Search As You Type, Autosuggestion etc.)
  • Making sure that we have highly available, fault-tolerant, highly scalable, elastic, low latency systems.
  • 99th Response < 50 ms
  • Serving millions of requests every day.
  • 0. Building something exciting in NLP space for scale.
  • Transformers, BiLSTM, Multi Language handling, NER, ChatGPT etc.
  • 1. Migrated ES cluster from ec2 to k8 setup with zero downtime, and keeping 100% data consistency.
  • 2. SpellChecker for Search-As-You-Type Platform(Spell Correction at Prefix level).
  • 3. Rearchitected Paytm Search Platform(Federated Search) to support vertical specific Search Experience.(No downtime, keeping 100% data consistency)
  • 4. Built Geo Hash based location filtered Search.
  • 5. Built ONDC Search/Discovery Platform (Location Aware Search)
  • 6. Built offline Search Relevance Measuring system, which can verify/figure out the correctness of test search approach.
  • Elastic search, Node, Typescript, Python, Django, uWsgi, Java, Springboot, Kafka, MySql, Performance Optimisation
JavaSpringElasticsearchSearch Engineering

Senior Software Engineer - Paytm Search

Jan 2021Apr 2022 · 1 yr 3 mos

  • Paytm Search
  • 150+ mn monthly active users, 20+ mn merchants.
  • Leading the development team/building multiple Search products for millions of users.
  • 1. Built/Led the development of Paytm Search V2.0 experience from scratch. (Search As You Type)
  • 2. Built/set up elastic cluster from scratch, lot of benchmarking to get required SLA, making sure that we have highly available, fault-tolerant, highly scalable, elastic, low latency system.
  • Response_99 < 60 ms,
  • Serving millions of requests every day.
  • 3. Worked on solving multiple Search Space problems from scratch for millions of users. (catalog with millions of docs, serves millions of search requests per day. )
  • 4. Took lots of tech initiatives/POC in terms of trying new technologies, tools and making awareness on using it.
  • 5. Lots of work around breaking existing Search Systems into multiple micro-services with DDD(Domain Driven Design), separation of concerns, reusability, focusing on choosing the right tech stack etc.
  • 6. Lots of work around benchmarking, performance engineering, making sure that we respond in minimal time(response 99 < 65 ms)
  • Apache AB, ESRally
  • 7. Re-Built existing search classifier to framework model which can run multiple versions of classifier without any code changes. Making sure that Response_99 < 6 ms
  • 8. User-based A/B framework, serving millions of requests every day.
  • Elastic search, Node, Typescript, Python, Django, uWsgi, Java, Springboot, Kafka, MySql, Performance Optimisation
JavaSpringElasticsearchSearch Engineering

Quinbay

Senior Software Engineer

Oct 2020Nov 2020 · 1 mo · Bengaluru Urban, Karnataka, India

  • Coviam v2.0 | Blibli(https://www.blibli.com/)
  • Loved my journey at Coviam/Quinbay(Blibli.com), learned lot of things here :)
  • 1. Worked on building distributed, event driven, fault tolerant and highly scalable data auditing system which can be used across all the services.
  • 2. Also worked on setting up search interface for getting the audit data using ElasticSearch.
JavaSpringKafkaSoftware Development

Coviam

3 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Jan 2020Sep 2020 · 8 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

  • Blibli(https://www.blibli.com/)
  • 1. Worked on building Blibli.com B2B E-Commerce platform from scratch(Sales order creation, order approval, order creation, order fulfilment etc.) Worked with 6 other engineers, and led the technical direction of product .
  • Worked on setting up all the required micro-services from scratch eg: order, customer, product, cart, finance etc, setup end to end data pipeline for the same.
  • java, springboot, kafka, mongodb, postgres, redis, gcp, consul, vault.
  • 2. Working on building catalog management system for Blibli.com Tivo(Ticket and voucher) which takes care of multiple use cases eg: profit configuration, inventory management, catalog management, data auditing etc.
  • java, project reactor, kafka, elastic search, mongodb, springboot, gcp, consul, vault
JavaSpringElasticsearchSoftware Development

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Nov 2018Aug 2019 · 9 mos

  • Blibli(https://www.blibli.com/)
  • 1. Worked on creating highly scalable Promo creation systems.(which touches multiple services eg: cart, search, product, pricing, merchant etc.)
  • 2. Worked on building Promo Scheduler, Email Scheduler.
  • 3. Worked on Price Scheduling, Price Indexing, Dynamic Pricing.
  • 4. Worked on setting up services for moving to gcp(consul, vault, docker, kubernetes ).
  • 5. Worked on upgrading Mongo DB from 3.2.18 to 4.0.3 for catalog system.
JavaSpringMongoDBSoftware Development

Software Engineer

Jul 2017Oct 2018 · 1 yr 3 mos

  • Blibli.com
  • Worked on core services of Indonesian Ecommerce(Blibli.com).
  • Spring data, Spring boot , redis, mongodb, kafka, scala, play framework, Solr, Microservices.
  • 1. Worked on adding new payment methods for various banks.
  • 2. Worked on building order summary apis for merchant side users. (Scala, Play)
  • 3. Worked on building Birthday rewards feature which sends voucher to customers.
  • 4. Worked on building generic, distributed crawling framework which allows to extract products information for various product sources/ecommerce sites.
  • 5. Worked on building generic data extraction/massager framework.
  • 6. Worked on building real time price comparison application which works for various categories eg: handphone, computer, camera, health & food, drink, washing machine, tv, refrigerator.
  • 7. Worked on building distributed multi mapping recommendation feature which gives multiple master products recommendation for given merchant product.
JavaSpringMongoDBSoftware Development

Supr daily

Senior Software Engineer

Aug 2019Dec 2019 · 4 mos · Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

  • Joined as 6th member of tech team, worked on building Master Address system,
  • Delivery Assist system.
  • Python, Django, Postgres, aws lambda
PythonDjangoPostgresSoftware Development

Oracle india pvt. ltd

Software Engineer

Mar 2016Jul 2017 · 1 yr 4 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

  • My work here involves Machine learning, struts2, objective c, javascript, jquery, weblogic.
  • Worked on on various JD Edwards mobile IOS and android application issues.
  • Working on Oracle hybrid mobile - MAF framework.
  • Also handling AIS server issues which provides interface to the rest services for jde.
JavaSpringJavaScriptSoftware Development

Cerner corporation

2 roles

Software Engineer

May 2015Mar 2016 · 10 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

  • Was part of Cerner Revenue Cycle team. Worked on building multiple features eg: appointment interaction etc.
  • Java Rcp, Sql, Cerner command language.
JavaSQLSoftware Development

Seasonal Internship

Jan 2015May 2015 · 4 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

  • Worked on WPF and CCL.
JavaSQLSoftware Development

Hp education servcies

Summer Training (J2EE with Struts)

May 2014Jun 2014 · 1 mo · Bangalore

  • Worked on JAVA STRUTS-2
JavaSoftware Development

Education

Vellore Institute of Technology

B.Tech — Information Technology

Jan 2011Jan 2015

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