Hello, I’m Bharat Kalluri. Thanks for checking my profile in your busy schedule! Here’s a TLDR if you don’t feel like going through the entire story
An engineer who really loves tech to the core and strongly believes good engineering can positively change people’s lives.
Worked in multiple fintech companies, the last one being Refyne. Was in the founding team of Refyne (along with founders and 4 other people) and was instrumental in getting the startup to profitability and growing the company from 0 to 1.5B$ in valuation.
Started off the lending infra vertical in Refyne, grew it to 5 people team and led it for two years, started the B2B vertical and grew it to 3 people and led it for a year, built out a loan management system, UPI integration, underwriting stack and many more projects. Was a blast.
On the side, I absolutely love teaching and writing. I’m trying to write a book called From Scratch which aims to build out daily use tech from scratch, I blog actively at my website and dump notes here. I have a lot of side projects on my github if that interests you.
Here goes the longer version
Professional
(scroll down for the side projects section)
Wells fargo as an Intern
I’ve studied in Sathyabama university and got placed in Wells fargo in campus placements. I’ve worked with React and a Python backend to build some internal data viz tooling. Back then I was excited to be in the fintech startup space and started looking out.
Shubhloans as a SDE I
After moving on from Wells fargo, I’ve joined a company called Shubhloans (which later got renamed to datasigns fintech and got acquired eventually).
I joined in and started taking care of the credit/underwriting division. Here is where I really learnt a lot of programming, patterns, the obsession for good names and high quality functional code, obsession over simplicity and many more things.
Built out
- a Rule engine in Python from scratch (not rocket science, this is one of the chapters now in from scratch. But for me back then it was thrilling)
- the credit decisioning infrastructure (built completely on micro services, which in retro was not the best of ideas)
- ETL pipelines
- an agent management system for managing collections
and many more projects
I was directly working with the Chief Risk Officer in Shubhloans. He came from Monzo and bought a ton of experience with him, it was great fun. I’ve learnt what its like to work with hard core domain people, translate that to tech and come up with solutions which help businesses make progress where it matters. This interestingly becomes one of my core USPs later on.
JitFin Co. as SDE II
After Shubhloans, I moved on to yet another fintech company called JitFin Co.
I was the first engineer to join this company. I’ve built out
- the backend for an invoice discounting platform, frontend, deployed infra on AWS, setup monitoring and got it to production.
Unfortunately this was exactly during covid time and the company did not do particularly well. So had to move on from here.
Refyne as SDE II and eventual progression to Staff engineer
Just when I was about to leave Refyne, the VP of engineering from Shubhloans reached out stating that he is starting up and wanted me in. This was before the logo of the company was even decided, very early on. I said yes and joined as an SDE II.
Over the next 5 years, I’ve gotten promoted from SDE II -> SDE III -> SDE IV / associate staff engineer -> Staff engineer.
When people ask what I did in Refyne, I often chuckle and think to myself what I did not do. Here is a incomplete list of things I did in Refyne
- Built out the core Earned wage access beta product along with the founding team, which helped us get seed
- Built out the GA product in NestJS with the founding team, setup the entire infra alone since at that point no one knew devops.
- Went on to start the B2B integrations wing in the company, built out integrations and ETL pipelines which handled funneling millions of user data every day
- Gave product demos to clients, managing expectations and getting complex integrations to production while setting up B2B wing, even gave a product demo to a hundred truck drivers in Telugu. Stuff you only get to do in early stage startups 😉
- Expanded B2B integrations team to three people
- Built out an Loan management system which supports multiple lenders, multiple bureaus, multiple lending products, verification of user data from government sources (like PAN) etc..
- Started the Lending infra team to build & support debt raising, audit support, compliance with RBI, lender management etc.. Grew this team to 5 people. Led this team for two years.
- Worked on numerous cost optimizations savings tens of thousands of dollars every month
- Built out UPI, Gold savings product and many other products
Refyne was where I really learnt how to manage people, manage engineering culture, how to talk to business people, CXOs. How to go on stage and communicate a vision with passion. How to figure out PMF, how to talk to customers, what it is like to test a hypothesis and go live with a product, have the strength to kill a product or feature if its not working out and many more ideas.
Eternally grateful for the breadth and depth of knowledge I got from Refyne.
Now its time to go on another adventure. Here’s where I am right now. Thanks for reading so far, if you like what you read and want to work together, feel free to write to me!
Now onto my side projects
Side projects
I’ve always done stuff on the side for fun. Here are some cool stuff I’m proud of
From scratch
A book exploring how the day to day tech we use is built, by building it from scratch.
Four chapters are done, around ten are planned and in pipeline.
Cleanmail
I was absolutely tired with the amount of junk in my mailbox and wanted to clean up around 10k emails. So created a tool which let’s you bulk delete and unsubscribe to senders all in one shot.
I’ve put it out on twitter and reddit, people since have used it to delete millions of junk form their inbox!
Misc projects
- Clickup toolkit: A python library on PyPI for working with clickup from your python scripts. Refyne used to use Clickup and I wanted to do some scripting. So built this out.
- Spotify-dl: A CLI tool built in golang to download songs from spotify using youtube. People seemed to like this.
- Indian engineering blogs: A repo to maintain engineering blogs by Indians. This is just to encourage and discover other engineering bloggers.
- Life counter: Shows you how much more time you have left. In tribute to “Memento Mori”. A good start page if you ask me. Built in Vue.
If you like what you read and want to work together, feel free to write to me!