Engineering Leader · India
Rounak
Saha.
I build engineering teams that ship complex systems at scale — from payments infrastructure processing millions of transactions, to AI tools adopted by the United Nations.
Engineering Leader · India
I build engineering teams that ship complex systems at scale — from payments infrastructure processing millions of transactions, to AI tools adopted by the United Nations.
About
I started as a software engineer and grew into leadership by solving progressively harder problems — not by stepping away from the technical depth, but by adding organisational leverage on top of it.
Over 9 years, I've built systems that process financial transactions at scale, led founding engineering efforts at an early-stage startup, and shipped AI-powered tools that found adoption from the UN. I've operated across the full stack of engineering leadership: technical roadmap, team structure, hiring, cross-functional alignment.
I care deeply about systems thinking — whether that's a distributed payments ledger or an engineering culture that scales. The two problems require the same discipline: clear ownership, minimal surprise, and the courage to simplify.
Experience
Senior Engineering Manager
Leading engineering across Urban Company's core platform — one of India's largest home services marketplaces. Responsible for team strategy, technical direction, and delivery across multiple squads. Progressed from Technical Lead to Engineering Manager to Senior Engineering Manager within 2 years, owning increasingly complex scopes at each stage.
Founding Engineer
Joined as a founding engineer at an early-stage fintech startup, contributing to the ground-up design of the product and engineering foundations. Operated with zero infrastructure, ambiguous requirements, and aggressive timelines — the full founding-engineer experience.
Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer
Built mission-critical systems with end-to-end ownership across financial technology (payments, reconciliations, settlements, accounting), order management, request state management, and provider monetisation. Worked at the intersection of reliability and business impact.
Research & Development Engineer
Lead engineer on Tika Vaani — a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project to digitise immunisation records across India using neural OCR. Built the OCR model, Android application, backend services, and legacy system integrations from scratch. Also developed Case Manager, a civic tool later adopted by the United Nations for Covid-19 response. Awarded Star Performer.
Researcher
Conducted research under Dr. Nishanth Sastry on social media influence operations — analysing IRA's role in the 2016 US Presidential Elections and building personality-trait recognition models from social data. Also researched fake multimedia detection and built a crowd-sourced platform for image and video verification. Featured in BuzzFeed News; speaker at the Chevening Conference 2018 (20% acceptance rate) and University of Bristol.
Chief Technical Officer
Took full technical ownership of a software firm in Kolkata at age 21. Led product and engineering across client engagements, setting the technical direction and managing delivery end-to-end.
Recognition
Chevening Scholar
UK Government's global scholarship programme. Awarded to future leaders demonstrating exceptional potential. Fully funded MSc at King's College London.
Dewang Mehta IT Award
Prestigious national IT industry recognition awarded for outstanding contribution to India's technology ecosystem.
UN Covid-19 Adoption
Civic tool built at Gram Vaani was adopted by the United Nations for Covid-19 response — a rare outcome for a side-project-scale system.
BuzzFeed News Feature
Interviewed and featured for research on detecting fake multimedia content at scale — a problem that was highly relevant to the 2018–2019 news cycle.
Speaker — Chevening Conference 2018
Selected to speak at the Chevening Conference (~20% acceptance rate) and University of Bristol on fake media detection and disinformation.
Star Performer — Gram Vaani
Awarded for initiating and delivering high-impact projects from scratch, with measurable real-world outcomes in public health and civic engagement.
Get In Touch