varun shridhar.

Varun Shridhar

Backend & platform engineering lead, nine years in. Mostly high-throughput systems, data pipelines and — lately — the plumbing that makes AI features survive contact with production traffic.

Currently leading engineering for Catalogue Intelligence at GobbleCube, a Series A AI-commerce startup, rebuilding the data layer that unifies and enriches 5M+ SKUs from global marketplaces.

Relocating to London · open to roles offering UK Skilled Worker sponsorship

9 yrsBuilding
20M+Daily users
1B+Requests / day
35Marketplaces

What I work with

Backend & Platform
Distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, data pipelines, streaming, schema design, observability & tracing
Languages
Go, Python, MySQL, JS, PHP, React · Echo, Flask, Laravel, Next.js
DevOps & Cloud
GCP, AWS, Snowflake, Kubernetes, Grafana, Prometheus
AI
GenAI/LLM integration, vector databases, prompt engineering, Amazon Bedrock, multi-agent workflows
Leading
Technical strategy, roadmap ownership, hiring & mentorship, cross-functional alignment, CXO stakeholder management
Habits
Trade-off analysis, incremental delivery, incident response, cost & performance optimisation

Where I’ve done it

GobbleCube

Mar 2026 — Present

AI growth copilot for consumer brands. Series A (£11M), 300+ brands across 30+ marketplaces in India and MENA — HUL, Tata Consumer, L’Oréal, ITC, Nivea, Hershey’s.

Technical Lead

  • Leading the redesign of the core data platform — two split enrichment systems, databases and warehouses folded into a single Temporal DAG with stage-wise observability. Time-to-dashboard cut from 72 hours to 24, projected 30% fewer support tickets across 300+ brands.
  • Own architecture and roadmap for the Catalogue Intelligence data layer. Lead a team of six (four AI, two backend), split 80:20 between hands-on engineering and growing the team. Report strategy and progress straight to the C-suite.
  • Spearheading vendor and platform strategy for the AI stack — LLM selection, prompt patterns, evaluation harness. Set the observability standards (tracing, metrics, cost attribution) now used across the wider engineering org.

Bobble AI

Jun 2019 — Oct 2025

AI keyboard apps for 20M daily users — in-house typing models, generative AI, curated regional content and live streaming.

Lead Engineer, Server-Side

Apr 2023 — Oct 2025
  • Designed and shipped the backend for GenAI typing features, scaled to 1M+ daily requests. Owned model serving strategy, budgets and cost controls.
  • Owned the Ad Tech vertical — 34% of company revenue. Auction-layer rework and new SDK partner integrations grew revenue 2.2x to £870K/year.
  • Owned backend architecture for Product Core (~60% of all features). Shipped personalised in-app chat agents and GenAI message/image generation: +3% Day-7 retention, +20% revenue per user.
  • Built the on-call and incident response process — runbooks, escalation paths, structured post-mortems. MTTR down ~40% on critical incidents.

Senior Software Engineer, Server-Side

Apr 2021 — Mar 2023
  • Led a 3-engineer team optimising cloud auto-scaling for a Python/TensorFlow inference service at 5M+ daily requests. Capacity modelling, warm-pool tuning and graceful degradation cut the error rate 30x to 0.001%.
  • Drove API design consensus and SLA negotiation across business, AI and server-side. Delivered a bulk sentence data processor for a £13B tech giant, detecting user language at 10K sentences per minute.

Software Engineer, Server-Side

Jun 2019 — Mar 2021
  • Refactored critical services from a Laravel monolith to a Go microservice — service contract, migration path and rollout. Latency down 70% to 100ms.
  • Built an auto-scaling live data streaming service for sporting events. 5M daily users, £87K annual revenue.
  • Delivered a voice-data collection tool for regional-dialect speech-to-text training. 6M recordings captured, +10% STT accuracy.

iArani Inc.

Sep 2017 — May 2019

Boutique digital marketing firm building web platforms and SaaS plugins for public and private sector clients.

Tech Lead

  • Led server-side, frontend and DevOps across 4–5 client web projects, plus custom SaaS plugins on Google Cloud APIs. £43K annual revenue and a 30% uplift in organic client traffic.

Paper trail

BTech, Electronics & CommunicationsVellore Institute of Technology · CGPA 8.05/10, First Class

2013 — 2017

Generative AI & AI Agents with Amazon BedrockAWS

May 2026

Claude Certified Architect, FoundationsAnthropic

Jul 2026

Project ManagementGoogle

Apr 2024

Best PerformerBobble AI

Q3 2021, Q2 2020

Off hours

18 handicap, which is the only metric on this page I’m not trying to improve. Hindi natively, English fluently, Spanish enthusiastically and inaccurately. The drums / gastronomy / mixology pages have been “coming soon” since 2024 — the backlog is real, the priorities are honest.

Say hello

Best reached by email. Happy to talk platform architecture, scaling war stories, or whether your LLM spend is actually doing anything.

varun.shridhar10@gmail.com linkedin github