Senior Backend Developer
I joined Deloitte's internal startup arm in 2023 knowing basic JavaScript and not much else. Eighteen months later I was the de facto backend lead on GPMS — a performance management platform we shipped from zero to production in 3 months (fastest 0-to-prod in our department's history), now serving 50,000+ employees across 6 business units.
The story I tell at dinner parties: two days before our biggest go-live, my manager left on a planned 2-week leave and handed me the keys. Daily 1-hour HR leadership cadence. A 4-person dev squad to keep shipping. 50+ production incidents in a fortnight. Hotfixes through full test stages in 2–3 hours. We came out clean. The HR business owner told my manager — half-joking — that I'd run the show better than he would have. A month later I won Best Individual Contributor across 50+ engineers and Best Team across 12, same year, same ceremony.
What makes me a little unusual: I grew up in a Mumbai slum, fought through tuberculosis in Class 12, still cleared JEE in the top 1%, and graduated #2 in my IIT Guwahati department. I learn fast, ship faster, and I don't need a hierarchy to tell me what good looks like. What I'm looking for: an early-stage startup (Series A–C), founding engineer or senior backend role. Small team, real equity, tight feedback loops, a product where the engineering bar is set by user need rather than approval hierarchy. Long term, I'm building my own company. This is step one.