Ujjaval Verma, Developer in Toronto, ON, Canada
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Ujjaval Verma

Bio

Ujjaval has led a payment platform clearing over two million transactions a day. He works as a hands-on fractional CTO and tech lead for early-stage teams, owning the architecture and writing code alongside the team. Ujjaval has shipped across payments, insurance, benefits, and edtech, so he has likely solved the problem before in another industry.

Portfolio

AI National
Node.js, React, OAuth, CI/CD Pipelines, PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS)...
Clamshell AI
TypeScript, Go, Python, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Firebase, AI Agents...
Kovo Fitness
CTO, Fractional CTO, Technical Leadership, Solution Architecture...

Experience

  • Distributed Systems - 10 years
  • Technical Leadership - 8 years
  • Software Architecture - 8 years
  • Solution Architecture - 8 years
  • TypeScript - 8 years
  • CTO - 7 years
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 6 years
  • Large Language Models (LLMs) - 4 years

Preferred Environment

GitHub, Claude Code, Slack, Small Senior Teams

The most amazing...

...system I have architected is a Matrix-protocol messaging back end on GKE that bridges WhatsApp, Telegram, and more into one conversation.

Work Experience

Fractional CTO and Tech Lead

2025 - PRESENT
AI National
  • Owned technical direction for a commercial insurance quote-comparison platform, from architecture through release cadence and production operations.
  • Built and led a small engineering team, owning hiring, mentoring, and delivery cadence, and cut manual processing effort by 75% for client-facing operations through durable agentic AI pipelines.
  • Cut AI spend 50-60% by leveraging layout-aware vector embeddings for the quote extraction and report generation pipeline.
  • Stood up end-to-end CI/CD and deployment infrastructure on bare-metal Hetzner using Docker, GitHub Actions, and Caddy/Rails. Infrastructure costs stayed flat while a small team shipped daily.
  • Redesigned the product experience, ran live demos for investors and prospective clients, and worked alongside the founder to sharpen investor material.
  • Continued as technical advisor since the platform stabilized: SOC 2 readiness, multi-tenant architecture, and white-labeled partner deployments.
Technologies: Node.js, React, OAuth, CI/CD Pipelines, PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Python, UI Components, Docker, MongoDB, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Systems Engineering, FastAPI, Prompt Engineering, Cloud Architecture, Linux, System Design, Engineering Management, System Architecture, Database Design, Back-end Architecture, Next.js, Tailwind UI, Cloudflare, LangGraph, Stripe Connect, Claude, Apache Kafka, Vite, LLM Integration, Google Cloud, Healthtech, AI Automation, SOC 2, Cloud Infrastructure, Supabase, Agentic Frameworks, CTO, Fractional CTO, Technical Leadership, Hiring, Roadmaps, Technology Strategy & Architecture, AI Product Strategy, Stakeholder Management, Fractional CTO Engagements, REST APIs, APIs, Payment APIs, AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Ruby on Rails 8, Startups, Leadership, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Finance APIs, Agentic AI Systems, Executive Leadership

Founding Engineer

2025 - 2026
Clamshell AI
  • Served as founding engineer for Shelly, an AI messaging companion that learns a user's voice and keeps their conversations going across WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and more.
  • Architected the Matrix-protocol messaging back end and the Mautrix bridges (Telegram, WhatsApp, and others) that unify every channel into a single conversation.
  • Built the distributed back end on Google Cloud, using GKE for orchestration and Pub/Sub for asynchronous message flow.
  • Designed and built a Docker-based integration testing harness for a polyglot monorepo, enabling safe autonomous large language model (LLM) execution with BuildKit and GitHub Actions caching to support high-velocity CI.
  • Established an agentic delivery workflow built on velocity (PR-sized delivery slices with dependency sequencing) and rigor (TDD, adversarial review loops, and UX/E2E evidence gates), growing engineering velocity 5x.
  • Led the iOS and Electron platforms through launch.
Technologies: TypeScript, Go, Python, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Firebase, AI Agents, Kubernetes, Claude, Codex, Agentic AI, Systems Engineering, Agentic Workflow Design, Architecture, Cloud Architecture, Linux, System Design, Engineering Management, System Architecture, Database Design, Back-end Architecture, PostgreSQL, LangGraph, Pydantic, Flask API, Vite, API Design, vLLM, LLM Integration, Google Cloud, Observability, AI Automation, Distributed Systems, Cloud Infrastructure, Production Support, OpenAPI, Agentic Frameworks, LangSmith, Docker, Solution Architecture, Slack, Startups, Leadership, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Agentic AI Systems, Executive Leadership

Fractional CTO and Tech Lead

2024 - 2025
Kovo Fitness
  • Acted as technical lead for a consumer fitness startup, trusted with the entire technical side of the company: architecture, infrastructure, hiring, and delivery.
  • Built the AI workout-generation engine and led a team of three developers to ship gamified, personalized plans as a cross-platform iOS and Android app.
  • Stood up production infrastructure end-to-end on Cloudflare, Caddy, and Linode Kubernetes, integrating the OpenAI API and managing the production database.
  • Applied product and technical judgment. Pushed back on features that would not move the needle for business and found simpler, more efficient paths to expedite usage growth.
  • Hired and managed developers to deliver a pixel-perfect UI against the Figma designs, and ran live product demos for prospective fitness influencers.
Technologies: CTO, Fractional CTO, Technical Leadership, Solution Architecture, Team Management, Hiring, Product Roadmaps, Kubernetes, OpenAI, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloudflare, Stakeholder Management, Fractional CTO Engagements, REST APIs, APIs, Startups, Agentic AI Systems, Executive Leadership

Technical Lead

2023 - 2025
Benefitbay, Inc.
  • Served as the primary client-facing technical owner for a health-benefits platform, setting scope, roadmap, and delivery commitments directly with the client.
  • Spearheaded the third-party payroll provider integration via Finch Connect APIs, letting clients connect hundreds of HR and payroll systems from within their own admin dashboard.
  • Automated payroll and employee data syncs for four large accounts, saving more than 50,000 hours of manual effort annually and letting the business scale without a matching increase in support headcount.
  • Ran SOC 2 Type II readiness drills for the platform with Caylent.
  • Led the development of the ancillary product lines, including dental, vision, and term life insurance.
  • Drove the adoption of AI-assisted development workflows using Cursor, Claude Code, and Microsoft Copilot.
  • Defined engineering standards and conducted performance reviews for the team.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (RoR), MySQL, JavaScript, Terraform, Tailwind CSS, Technical Leadership, Ruby, Agentic AI, Claude, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Full-stack Development, CSS, Redis, Redis Cache, Sidekiq, Turbo, Hotwire, UI Components, Stimulus, PostgreSQL, AI Agents, Systems Engineering, Prompt Engineering, SendGrid, Architecture, Cloud Architecture, Linux, System Design, Authentication, System Architecture, AWS Cloud Architecture, Database Design, Back-end Architecture, Tailwind UI, Data Privacy, HIPAA, API Design, LLM Integration, Healthtech, HL7, Observability, Data Modeling, Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Electronic Health Records (EHR), Distributed Systems, Distributed Tracing, SOC 2, Cloud Infrastructure, AWS ECS Fargate, Compliance, HIPAA Compliance, Software Architecture, OpenAPI, Agentic Frameworks, Solution Architecture, Technology Strategy & Architecture, Team Management, People Management, Software Development Management, Roadmaps, Product Roadmaps, Stakeholder Management, B2B, Small Senior Teams, REST APIs, Slack, APIs, Ruby on Rails 8, Startups, Leadership

Mentor and Masterclass Instructor

2020 - 2025
Scaler
  • Coached working engineers with three to seven years of experience one-on-one, more than 50 mentees to date, on SOLID design principles, high- and low-level system design, and data structures and algorithms.
  • Extended the coaching past the technical into interview preparation, resume building, and career progression.
  • Delivered quarterly masterclasses, more than 20 in total, to live audiences of 75 to 150 engineers and occasionally around 250, with recent sessions on technical leadership and on using AI tools to accelerate engineering productivity.
  • Featured in Scaler's mentor spotlight, "Teach and Grow."
Technologies: Mentorship, System Design, Technical Leadership, Software Architecture, Distributed Systems, Data Modeling, Team Leadership, Startups

Solutions Architect

2022 - 2024
Go Aspen
  • Led the 3rd-party video-calling integration for a remote-inspection progressive web app, engineered to self-recover through poor real-world network conditions.
  • Designed and built the AWS-powered back end in Go, supporting inventory audits and remote insurance claims, including high-resolution geo-tagged photo capture.
  • Raised remote-inspection success rate from about 85% to more than 97% against the solution it replaced.
  • Mentored two engineers on the eight-person team. The architecture decisions held up long after the engagement ended.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Solution Architecture, Technical Leadership, Mentorship, Software Architecture, Consulting, Go, REST APIs, APIs, Startups

Technical Lead, Monetization

2022 - 2023
Teachable
  • Served as the back-end architect and technical lead for the monetization team.
  • Led the integration with Stripe APIs, eliminating roughly $2.5 million a year in cross-border FX fees.
  • Built a rules-engine-driven smart caching framework over Radar's fraud API, cutting external API calls by more than 85% and saving about $500,000 annually.
  • Recovered roughly $3 million a year for the business across the two initiatives.
Technologies: Go, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Microservices, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ruby, React, Stripe, Technical Leadership, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Full-stack Development, Redis Cache, Sidekiq, Turbo, GraphQL, System Design, Fintech, Payment Processing, System Architecture, AWS Cloud Architecture, Tailwind UI, Stripe Connect, Observability, Compliance, Financial Services, OpenAPI, Solution Architecture, Team Leadership, Software Architecture, REST APIs, Slack, APIs, Payment APIs, Startups, Leadership, Finance APIs

Technical Lead

2020 - 2022
PhonePe
  • Served as the technical lead and scrum master for the recharge and bill-payments pod at one of India's largest consumer payment apps, representing engineering to business, site reliability engineering, support, and operations.
  • Spearheaded the direct integration with NPCI's Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS), now processing over two million transactions amounting to more than 1 billion rupees daily, and improving profitability by over 50 crore rupees a year.
  • Led the direct integration with Tata Sky DTH, the platform's largest biller, improving margins by 90 basis points per transaction and lifting the success rate from around 97% to more than 99%.
  • Launched a new subscriptions category that grew to the highest market share among competitors, with biller onboarding automated to require zero developer intervention.
  • Helped implement a multi-datacenter active-active setup supporting disaster recovery across data centers in a regulated payments environment.
  • Owned the hiring bar, formally mentored engineers on architecture and career growth, conducted performance reviews, and ran SOC 2 readiness drills with Deloitte.
Technologies: MySQL, Python, CI/CD Pipelines, Docker, Microservices, Software Architecture, API Integration, SQL, Technical Leadership, Software Design, Databases, OAuth, ETL Pipelines, Systems Engineering, FastAPI, Cloud Architecture, Linux, System Design, Authentication, Fintech, Payment Processing, System Architecture, Database Design, Back-end Architecture, Cloudflare, Data Privacy, Apache Kafka, Pydantic, Flask API, API Design, Observability, Data Modeling, Distributed Systems, Distributed Tracing, SOC 2, Cloud Infrastructure, Production Support, Reliability Engineering, Compliance, Financial Services, OpenAPI, Team Leadership, Hiring, Technical Hiring, Mentorship, People Management, Software Development Management, Stakeholder Management, REST APIs, Slack, APIs, Payment APIs, Django, Startups, Leadership, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Finance APIs

Senior Software Engineer

2017 - 2019
ExpertVoice
  • Built the expert advocacy platform for consumer brands and took the brand-facing expert exploration feature suite to general availability.
  • Delivered the UX with JavaScript, Backbone.js, and Go templates over a RESTful microservice back end written in Go and Ruby on Rails.
  • Wrote an Azkaban batch analytics workflow behind the marketer platform's autocomplete, improving campaign app page load from around eight seconds to under three.
  • Took a CRM product with vague customer requirements, turned it into clear product and engineering specs, and led a junior engineer plus two partner engineering teams, product, design, and QA to launch.
Technologies: JavaScript, Ruby, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Go, MySQL, Terraform, Redis, CI/CD Pipelines, Microservices, Node.js, React, Software Architecture, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Full-stack, SQL, Architecture, Technical Leadership, Software Design, Databases, GitHub, OAuth, Full-stack Development, CSS, Redis Cache, Sidekiq, ETL Pipelines, Linux, AWS Cloud Architecture, Database Design, Back-end Architecture, PostgreSQL, Data Modeling, Distributed Systems, Distributed Tracing, eCommerce, B2B, Mentorship, REST APIs, Slack, APIs, Startups

Software Development Engineer II

2016 - 2017
Expedia Group
  • Helped build the next generation of AWS-powered payment processing services that process 97% of Expedia's transactions, cutting annual hardware costs by 25%.
  • Owned service observability for the Task Execution Framework: a RESTful Java web service plus dashboards, monitoring, and alerting built on Splunk telemetry.
  • Set up integration tests for an asynchronous processing framework covering end-to-end calls across multiple microservices, automated in a Jenkins build pipeline.
Technologies: Terraform, CI/CD Pipelines, Microservices, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Architecture, Software Design, Databases, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Linux, Fintech, Payment Processing, Back-end Architecture, Data Modeling, Distributed Systems, Cloud Infrastructure, Production Support, Reliability Engineering, Financial Services, REST APIs, Slack, APIs, Payment APIs, Finance APIs

Software Engineer

2015 - 2016
Microsoft
  • Served as the primary engineer for the canonical-name service on the Intune team within the Enterprise Client Mobility suite, the product that manages enterprise device fleets.
  • Cut end-to-end account-provisioning test execution from 60-80 minutes to 10-15 minutes, and defined runner phases so a failure could be traced to the code module that caused it.
  • Wrote an OData-based RESTful WCF data service for the team's component testing framework, implementing CRUD for graph-client-helper library requests.
  • Worked with senior developers to cut the system test failure rate by 90% and test execution time by 50%, saving more than 10% in hardware costs.
Technologies: Microservices, TypeScript, SQL, Authentication, HIPAA, Data Modeling, Distributed Systems, Reliability Engineering

Software Developer

2012 - 2015
Epic
  • Served as a full-stack developer on Chart Search, Epic's clinical content search engine, on the EpicCare Ambulatory team.
  • Built break-the-glass emergency access controls, a HIPAA compliance mechanism letting clinicians reach records outside their normal permission scope in an emergency, with every override logged and justified.
  • Added support for nested queries, including multiple boolean operators and parentheses, over healthcare data at scale within Chart Search.
  • Developed a framework to highlight abnormal BMI values in a patient chart, shipped in the 2014 release.
Technologies: HIPAA Compliance, HIPAA, Compliance, Healthtech, Electronic Health Records (EHR), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Data Privacy, Full-stack, Databases

Teaching Assistant and Research Developer

2010 - 2012
IIIT Hyderabad
  • Served as a teaching assistant for the Computer Programming (CSE101) and Software Engineering (ICSE461) courses.
  • Worked as a research assistant at the EERC earthquake lab. Built Java applet simulations for the Ministry of Education's national Virtual Labs initiative, letting students run civil engineering experiments virtually.
  • Developed a Python GUI application to monitor hardware parameters of the NAO humanoid robot over WiFi for robot soccer, presented at the 2010 Research and Development Showcase.
  • Built a web portal centralizing room allotment, mess registration, and payment receipt generation for the 2010 admissions intake.
Technologies: Python, System Design

Experience

AI-powered Insurance Quote Comparison

https://ainational.ai/
As a fractional CTO, I owned the technical direction of a commercial-grade quote-comparison engine built on modern UI frameworks and durable, agentic AI workflows, delivering real-time insights. This improved data accuracy and reduced manual processing effort by 75% for client-facing operations.

I fine-tuned domain-specific ChatGPT and Claude models by optimizing prompts, training data, and routing logic. This effort cut token usage by 50-60% while elevating the precision, consistency, and quality of client service.

Additionally, I established an end-to-end CI/CD and deployment infrastructure using Docker, GitHub Actions, and Caddy/Rails, and led a cross-functional team to accelerate feature delivery cycles. This infrastructure improved release reliability and enabled faster iteration, benefiting stakeholders with more timely updates and enhancements.

Shelly by Clamshell AI

https://clamshell.ai/
As a founding engineer, I built Shelly, an AI messaging companion that learns how you talk and keeps conversations going across WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and more.

I architected the Matrix-protocol messaging back end and the Matrix bridges that unify every channel into a single conversation, running on Google Cloud with GKE for orchestration and Pub/Sub for asynchronous message flow.

I also designed the Docker-based integration testing harness that lets autonomous LLM agents execute safely inside a polyglot monorepo, with BuildKit and GitHub Actions caching to keep CI fast. The harness increased engineering velocity by 5x and is what makes it safe to run AI development agents against a production codebase. Agent-written code clears the same review bar as anyone else's.

Fitness App with Gamified, Custom AI-generated Workouts

https://kovofitness.com/
As a fractional CTO and investor, I was entrusted with the company's entire technical operations. I led a team of three developers to ship a cross-platform iOS and Android fitness app that uses generative AI to build personalized workout plans, and I implemented the AI workout-generation engine myself.

For the back-end infrastructure, I set up a robust environment using Cloudflare, Caddy, and Linode Kubernetes to host the API service, integrate with the OpenAI API, and manage the production database. Additionally, I hired and managed developers to ensure a pixel-perfect UI/UX implementation based on the Figma designs, ensuring the final product was visually compelling and user-friendly.

Go Aspen - Remote Inspection Platform

As a fractional solutions architect, I led the video integration behind a remote-inspection product and engineered it to survive real-world network conditions.

The progressive web app supports inventory audits and remote insurance claims, with WebRTC video that self-recovers on poor connections and high-resolution geo-tagged photo capture. Built from the ground up, it achieved a success rate above 97% for remote inspections, compared to 85% for the solution it replaced.

I also mentored two engineers on the eight-person team, and the architecture decisions held up long after the engagement ended.

Barosa (Luxury Collectibles Marketplace)

https://www.barosa.co/
As a fractional solutions architect, I worked directly with Stripe's technical points of contact and ensured up-to-date API documentation to design the payment architecture for Barosa.co. In this peer-to-peer marketplace, collectors buy and sell luxury watches, cars, and other collectibles, backed by identity verification and 100% escrow.

I led a team of 3 engineers (1 iOS, 1 Android, 1 web) to ship the Stripe integration across all three clients in 3 months, completing the escrow-backed payment flow that anchors Barosa's core trust differentiator for its MVP launch.

Crowdfunding Investment App with a Social Element

https://loupt.co/
As a fractional architect, I led a team of two to take an equity crowdfunding platform from concept to launch, letting non-accredited investors buy equity in early-stage startups. I set the architecture: React front end, Express.js back end, MongoDB data store, and Amazon S3 object store.

Live Video Lectures Platform

https://www.slideshare.net/UjjavalVerma4/aws-powered-online-classes-platform
I designed and implemented a RESTful microservice that leveraged AWS Elemental MediaLive and MediaConvert pipelines to live streams and video-on-demand lectures and tutorials for users of the Pariksha Edutech mobile app (Pariksha.co).

The in-house implementation supported over 100 concurrent streams and achieved a low latency of fewer than 12 seconds compared to YouTube's 25-second and Vimeo's 30-second latency for live streams. I also mentored four engineers on the fifteen-person team that shipped it.

Virtual Labs Experiments

https://www.vlab.co.in/participating-institute-iiit-hyderabad
I developed Java applets that allowed for conducting civil engineering experiments on a computer virtually. These interactive simulations were deployed as part of the national Virtual Labs initiative of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.

Education

2008 - 2012

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad - Hyderabad, India

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Node.js, React, Stripe, Stripe Connect, REST APIs, Sidekiq, Pydantic, Flask API, vLLM, OpenAPI

Tools

GitHub, Terraform, Claude, Claude Code, Turbo, Hotwire, Caddy Server, Codex, SendGrid, Slack

Languages

JavaScript, Go, TypeScript, Ruby, SQL, Python, CSS, HTML, GraphQL

Frameworks

Ruby on Rails (RoR), Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Stimulus, LangGraph, Agentic Frameworks, Express.js, Django

Paradigms

Microservices, Database Design, Back-end Architecture, Model Context Protocol (MCP), HIPAA Compliance, B2B

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Firebase, Apache Kafka, AWS Lambda, LangSmith, Vercel

Storage

MySQL, Redis, Databases, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redis Cache, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Google Cloud

Other

CI/CD Pipelines, API Integration, Full-stack, Architecture, Technical Leadership, Software Design, Software Architecture, AI Agents, OpenAI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Full-stack Development, Systems Engineering, System Design, Fintech, System Architecture, LangChain, API Design, Observability, Data Modeling, Distributed Systems, Cloud Infrastructure, Production Support, Fractional CTO, Solution Architecture, Team Leadership, APIs, Payment APIs, Startups, Leadership, Finance APIs, Agentic AI, OAuth, Artificial Intelligence (AI), UI Components, ETL Pipelines, FastAPI, Prompt Engineering, Agentic Workflow Design, Cloud Architecture, Engineering Management, Authentication, Payment Processing, AWS Cloud Architecture, Tailwind UI, Cloudflare, Data Privacy, HIPAA, Vite, LLM Integration, Healthtech, HL7, AI Automation, Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Electronic Health Records (EHR), Distributed Tracing, SOC 2, AWS ECS Fargate, Reliability Engineering, Compliance, Financial Services, Supabase, eCommerce, CTO, Technology Strategy & Architecture, Software Development Management, Team Management, People Management, Hiring, Technical Hiring, Mentorship, Roadmaps, Product Roadmaps, Stakeholder Management, Consulting, AI Product Strategy, AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Ruby on Rails 8, Agentic AI Systems, Executive Leadership, Small Senior Teams, Fractional CTO Engagements

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