Software Architect · Engineering Manager · Middleware & Distributed Systems
I design systems that live between software — middleware, microservices, integrations, the distributed architecture that enterprise products quietly depend on. Seven years of that work across startupseffy · CultureMonkey and global enterprisesAccenture · Cigna has given me one consistent satisfaction: solving people problems with technology.
From writing ETL pipelines at Accenture to architecting systems and embedding AI into real business workflows — I've led teams, managed delivery across two productseffy · CultureMonkey simultaneously, and shipped 60+ integrations between platforms that were never meant to talk to each other. One belief has held through all of it: design for failure first. Success takes care of itself.
An AI copilot that lives inside Freshdesk — crawls your knowledge base, past resolved tickets, and macros to surface the most relevant reply for each ticket. Agents review and send. No tab switching, no knowledge hunting.
43% faster FRT · 2× within-SLA · 30% lower handle time · 60% drop in after-hours work
Open-source MCP servers that expose Freshdesk and Freshservice as tool-callable APIs — built during the early days of the MCP ecosystem. Validated internally by resolving 1,000+ support tickets at effy before public release.
46 GitHub stars · 27 forks · Listed on Smithery.ai
Brought CultureMonkey's employee engagement surveys directly into Microsoft Teams — so HR teams could run surveys without asking employees to open another tool. Live on Microsoft AppSource.
A Chrome extension that reads Gmail meeting invites and converts timezones inline — for people who spend half their day decoding '4pm EST'. Shipping soon.
Took an existing Zoho People auth boilerplate and built the full sync architecture on top — multi-tenant isolation, error handling, retry logic, and customer onboarding workflows. Replicated across Keka HR, Workday, Darwinbox, UKG, and Workline.
6 HRMS platforms · 100,000+ employee records synced
An in-house MFT service for CultureMonkey — gave enterprise customers a clean, configurable way to drop employee data files when APIs weren't an option. Dedicated FTP endpoint, per-customer configuration, clean internal workflow.
Shopify, ServiceNow, Magento, Slack, WhatsApp, Nium, Delhivery and 50+ more. One integration processed millions of student records — a drain stuck for weeks, resolved in 3 days via PM2 cluster mode and dual-layer throttling.
Before: SSH into servers to check logs. After: centralised Grafana stack across 20+ services, custom dashboards, automated Slack and email alerts, and phase.dev for secrets management. Full deployment lifecycle — dev to staging to production — owned solo.
20+ services · Grafana + Prometheus + ELK · Solo ownership
Replaced manual Slack DM approval chains with a structured form → automated approval routing → Finance auto-notification workflow. Zero follow-ups required. Pattern became a template for multiple other internal automations.
50+ projects in feasibility at any time, most never converting. Fix: lightweight feasibility format with go/no-go criteria, BA-to-dev handoff templates, and customer sign-off checkpoints before engineering effort began. Less wasted effort, better-aligned solutions.
The happy path is obvious — any engineer can make that work. It's the retry storms, the cascading failures, the edge cases at 2am that reveal whether an architecture actually holds. Complexity earns its place. It doesn't get assumed in.
Retry logic and idempotency aren't advanced topics — they're the minimum bar. I treat failure handling as a first-class design requirement, not something you add after the first production incident teaches you why it matters.
Assess blast radius. Stabilise. Communicate honestly — no speculation, just facts and timelines. Then find the root cause, and more importantly, find the observability gap that let it go undetected. Fix the system. Then document it — because the next engineer deserves a map, not a mystery.
I don't consider a project closed until the decisions, outcomes, and architecture are written down — whether it succeeded or failed. A clear diagram sent over email has saved more client relationships than any feature ever has. Clarity is a deliverable.
Anyone can add abstraction layers, queues, and microservices. The discipline is knowing when not to. The best systems I've built look obvious in hindsight — which means all the hard thinking happened before the first line of code.
I don't consider anything done until there's a conclusion — written down, shared, and acted on. An unfinished thing isn't work in progress. It's just debt.
Seivana thirundha sei. Thoroughness isn't perfectionism — it's respect for the problem. A fast solution that half-works will cost you more than a slow one that works completely.
Advice tells people what to do. A perspective gives them a new way to see — and lets them arrive at their own answer. The second one sticks. The first breeds dependency.
There's a Tamil saying about the Anna paravai — a bird that drinks only the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving the water behind. I try to consume information, feedback, and energy the same way. Take what builds you. Leave the rest.
Motivation comes and goes. Discipline is a system you build once and run forever. Consistency isn't the goal — it's what happens when the system works.
The world is incomprehensibly larger than any one person's knowledge. That's not a reason for self-doubt — it's a reason to stay curious, stay humble, and keep going anyway.
effy
Associate Engineering Manager
2022 — 2025
CultureMonkey
Senior Lead Engineer
2021 — 2025
effy
Software Consultant → Senior Engineer
2021 — 2022
Accenture · Cigna
Full Stack Engineer
2018 — 2021
What I'm open to
Full-time opportunities
Exploring roles in engineering or engineering management — primarily in AI adoption, integrations, or distributed systems. Looking for the right fit over the fastest offer.
Freelance & consulting
Open to integration architecture, AI product consulting, and engineering process work. I prefer focused, short engagements where I can go deep and add real value.
Just a conversation
Building something interesting in the middleware or AI adoption space? Always up for a good technical conversation — no agenda needed.