Viral Lalakia

Engineering Manager

Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India14 yrs 11 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

14+ years of software engineering experience.
Proven track record in team leadership and mentoring.
Expertise in building scalable and robust systems.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech and SaaS expert with strong leadership and software development skills.

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Skills

Core Skills

Team LeadershipNode.jsJavaJavascriptUser ExperienceArchitectural DesignSoftware ArchitectureEtl ProcessesWeb DevelopmentWeb Technologies

Other Skills

ActiveMQAlgorithmsApache KafkaCSSCode ReviewCommunicationData StructuresDocumentationEvent Driven ProgrammingHTMLJ2EEJMSJava Enterprise EditionMySQLOracle

About

I am a software engineer with 14+ years of experience, with a history of productivity and exceptional performance with good technical, analytical, problem-solving, communication and leadership skills. I have 8+ years of experience in designing robust, scalable and high performance applications in Node.js, Java and web-based technologies. I have 4+ years of experience in leading teams of 5+ engineers responsible for delivering high-quality software products in a fast-paced startup environment. I have significant experience with practical use of various data structures and algorithms. In my leadership roles, I have been working on building and scaling engineering teams, mentoring and coaching engineers, and driving engineering culture and practices. I also significantly contribute to the architecture and design of the systems my team works on. I have vast experience in collaborating with cross-functional teams—spanning product, customer support, banking and KYC operations, and legal and compliance—to align engineering efforts with the broader business goals and deliver high-quality software products. As a human, I believe in continuous self-learning and self-improvement - this belief is my north star. As an engineer, I am passionate about developing scalable and robust systems while learning new technologies.

Experience

14 yrs 11 mos

Total Experience

3 yrs 8 mos

Average Tenure

5 yrs

Current Experience

Novo

Engineering Manager

Jun 2021 – Present · 5 yrs · Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

Positions held:
Engineering Manager (Feb 2024–Present)
Technical Lead (Jun 2021–Jan 2024)
As an Engineering Manager at Novo, I lead a high-performing engineering team responsible for critical product areas such as Identity and Access Management and Onboarding, ensuring high-quality delivery, efficiency, and team productivity. I collaborate closely with cross-functional teams—spanning product, customer support, banking and KYC operations, and legal and compliance—to align engineering efforts with the broader business goals. I am committed to mentoring and developing the engineers on my team by setting personalized, challenging goals, and providing clear, actionable feedback to support their growth and success.
My journey at Novo:
I joined Novo in June 2021 as a Technical Lead, becoming the first engineer on a new team responsible for enhancing the user experience across Novo’s products. As the department grew rapidly—from 15 to 50 engineers in 6–8 months—I played a pivotal role in onboarding and mentoring new engineers on my team, while also contributing to the hiring process to ensure successful growth.
In early 2022, as my team’s focus shifted to the onboarding and signup experience to align with Novo’s vision of expanding its customer base, I led the smooth transition of our team to this new product area. As a team in a startup, we took on multiple responsibilities, including KYC/KYB for customers, login management, fraud mitigation, risk handling, and managing user and business profiles. We also built external APIs for partners from scratch, enabling a new customer acquisition channel within weeks.
In early 2024, I stepped up as an engineering manager of the same team. While we still manage the previously mentioned areas, we have evolved into a platform team focused on building a centralized Identity and Access Management system to support Novo's wide range of products, including business checking account, line of credit, cards, invoices, and more.

Node.jsJavaTeam LeadershipCommunicationProblem SolvingData Structures+1

Infor

Principal Software Engineer

Jun 2018 – Jun 2021 · 3 yrs · Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

Positions held:
Principal Software Engineer (Nov 2019 - Jun 2021)
Senior Software Engineer (Jun 2018 - Oct 2019)
My responsibilities included design discussions across multiple teams, and development and contribution to various Java projects of our BI product. I contributed in maintaining code quality by peer code review process and helped with documentation of various product areas and features I designed and developed.
Accomplishments and key contributions:
Acted as a lead developer and architect for a new feature Compare and Merge which was a self-service tool for the end users to manage and customize the pre-built content released periodically. Contributed significantly in the design and development of the project.
Led the development and stability of high impacting feature Async Processing after learning JMS/ActiveMQ within a few months of joining the team.
Successfully coordinated Async Processing feature stabilization and deployment as a stable feature across multiple cloud sites, which significantly improved user experience, robustness of ETL jobs and resource utilization in the cloud.
Acted as a lead developer and coordinated with the Product team for Column Level Security feature of our BI product, which adopted report visualization as per user’s access to various data points used in the reports.

JavaJMSActiveMQCode ReviewDocumentationArchitectural Design

Quinstreet

Development Project Manager

Oct 2013 – Jun 2018 · 4 yrs 8 mos · Pune, Maharashtra, India

Positions held:
Development Project Manager (Jul 2016 - Jun 2018) - Designated as Sr. Manager
Development Lead (Jul 2014 - Jun 2016) - Designated as Manager
Software Web Engineer (Oct 2013 - Jun 2014)
I designed and led the development of all Java and web based projects and websites for our team in education domain in Brazil. I successfully managed development and release process for various projects for our team, and led the development team. I was also responsible for maintaining code quality and technical documentation for our projects.
Accomplishments and key contributions:
Designed and developed easily configurable and highly scalable code-base to manage multiple lead generation websites. This code-base improved performance of websites and decreased load-time by 8-10%. It also reduced development efforts for new websites and flows to 50%.
Designed and developed a portal for call center agents to generate applications for our clients in education domain in Brazil, along with real time lead delivery integration and a dashboard to track daily application targets.
Successfully led the company-wide initiative of technology stack migration to the latest versions for our team in education domain in Brazil.
Enhanced lead generation websites platform to support new type of clients with minimal configurations, which will reduce development efforts to support future clients of similar type on all or selected websites.
Developed scheduled jobs to manage lead delivery, to transfer data among multiple databases and to generate alerts and reports.
Successfully developed and implemented easily configurable JavaScript utility to transform any regular HTML forms in to multi-step forms to enhance user experience on lead generation websites.

JavaWeb DevelopmentTechnical Documentation

Cognizant

Software Engineer

Jun 2011 – Sep 2013 · 2 yrs 3 mos · Pune, Maharashtra, India

Positions held:
Software Engineer (Jul 2012 - Sep 2013) - Designated as Programmer Analyst
Jr. Software Engineer (Jun 2011 - Jun 2012) - Designated as Programmer Analyst Trainee
I contributed in the development of different Java projects, including some development changes for UI projects. I learnt new technologies quickly as per requirements and delivered working, bug-free solutions.
Accomplishments and key contributions:
Enhanced the user experience of a stable product B2B Permissioning UI by implementing deep linking within a week, which helped end users with bookmarking and easy navigation of various product pages.
One of the two key engineers responsible for design and development of TechSocial (a social portal for tech vertical members) which was completed in 6 months and developed using Java, Spring MVC and jQuery.
Understood legacy codebase and all requirements in a very short period and completed migration of eEntry project within 4 months, 2 months before the estimated deadline.

JavaSpring MVCjQueryWeb Development