I believe the best engineering teams ship like small startups — fast, opinionated, and with clear ownership. That’s what I try to build.
I’m Rohit. I lead consumer engineering at DriveX, where I manage a team of 12 engineers building four products: a consumer website, a dealer management application, a C2C marketplace, and India’s first vehicle auction platform that runs entirely on WhatsApp. I joined as a Tech Lead, was promoted to Engineering Manager, and am now moving into an Architect role.
I started as a data scientist at Datasutram while still in college — Employee #1 at a B2B SaaS startup. I built satellite image classification models for development indices and NLP models for Indian name-community classification. That’s where I learned what it means to build from nothing.
From there I became the founding engineer at Epic One. I was the sole engineer on day one. I built the MVP, shipped three follow-up versions, grew the team to 12 people, and laid the foundations for a multi-tenant microservice architecture. Our product powered the Bangalore International Airport rewards program and consumer application. Epic One was acquired by Reward360 Global Services.
At Reward360, I worked on fintech systems at real scale. I built a multi-tenant real-time e-gift voucher sourcing engine that cut delivery time from hours to under 90 seconds — used by HDFC, Standard Chartered, and Axis Bank. I owned the entire backend API layer for the loyalty super app and built a real-time server-to-server communication platform connecting external clients with the internal loyalty engine.
Then I joined Clootrack, where I helped move the company from MVP stage to a product used by 100+ enterprise clients, growing from just 3. I led the transition from manual weekly-report delivery to automated template creation, built a data edits feature that turned a 5-day insights republishing process into instant, and laid the foundation for Clootrack 2.0’s scalable multi-tenant microservice architecture.
Outside of work, I ship things. I’ve built 14+ side projects — not as hobbies, but as a practice. Each one is an excuse to explore a new problem space, learn a technique, or test an idea.
The most recent is IdeaMaze, a framework that extends Andrej Karpathy’s auto-research with parallel execution in git worktrees, a structured SQLite knowledge base, and gamification detection that catches AI agents cheating their own metrics. It ran 155 autonomous experiments across two research runs and improved model performance by 68.6% in the first run.
Other projects include semantic search over 4.8M company records, AI-powered tax consultation for Indian tax law, a Chrome extension for automatic webpage summarization, and a Splitwise alternative with AI-based food categorization. See all projects.
Engineering leadership. Shipping culture. AI/ML tools and agents. The transition from IC to manager. I write about what I learn — from building teams, from building products, and from building things on the side.
GitHub · Twitter/X · LinkedIn · rohitagarwal.dev@gmail.com