Kartik Arora
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Toptal member since September 29, 2022
Kartik is passionate about building teams, products, and tech for startups. He has five years of experience as a first back-end developer, though he sometimes ventures into the front end and DevOps. He has built and scaled multiple products and teams from scratch to multi-million dollar ARRs. Kartik also has freelance experience with Karat in the USA, and BarRaiser in India, for whom he conducted over 500 technical interviews as an interview expert.
Portfolio
Experience
- Node.js - 6 years
- MongoDB - 5 years
- MySQL - 5 years
- Interviewing - 4 years
- TypeScript - 4 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 4 years
- Java - 3 years
- Spring Boot - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Spring Boot, Java, Ruby, Ruby on Rails (RoR), JavaScript, Node.js, Java 11
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed from scratch is the back-end of the Cult.fit eCommerce store. I also led the team and scaled the project to a multi-million dollars ARR.
Work Experience
Tech Lead and Product Manager
Keep Technologies
- Spearheaded the implementation of transaction monitoring for all outgoing transactions from Keep card and banking accounts, enhancing security and risk management.
- Led the customer application process for Keep, collaborating closely with both the sales and operations teams to optimize and simplify our KYB, KYC, fraud detection, and underwriting workflows. Implemented data gathering and verification procedures.
- Launched several developer productivity tools for teams across Keep, like advanced Git flows and streamlined deployment pipelines.
Interview Expert
Karat
- Conducted more than 100 interviews through the Karat platform.
- Contributed to the hiring process of leading companies operating across the globe.
- Gained experience in conducting language agnostic interviews.
Co-founder and CTO
Zecko
- Spearheaded the development of Zecko, a pioneering platform offering universal eCommerce APIs and no-code widgets. This innovation enables digital platforms to sell products of any DTC brand seamlessly.
- Played a crucial role in successfully integrating Shopify infrastructure to rapidly develop an MVP, showcasing deep understanding and practical skills in utilizing Shopify's capabilities to their fullest potential.
- Focused on creating an intuitive user experience, enabling easy navigation and interaction, a critical factor for the success of online sales platforms.
- Led a multidisciplinary team through the challenging 0-to-1 product development journey, ensuring timely delivery and quality of eCommerce solutions.
- Played a pivotal role in shaping the strategic direction of eCommerce initiatives, aligning them with the company's broader business goals.
- Demonstrated proficiency in leveraging Shopify APIs to create robust, scalable eCommerce solutions.
- Developed custom, no-code widgets to enhance functionality and user engagement on Shopify-based platforms.
- Platform Scalability and Integration: I ensured that the eCommerce platform built on Shopify was scalable and seamlessly integrated with other business systems, demonstrating his comprehensive technical acumen.
Interview Expert
BarRaiser
- Integrated the team from the beginning of the project and helped in the early stage of product development.
- Conducted 200+ interviews over the last three years.
- Contributed to the hiring process of several startups and leading companies operating across the globe.
Founding Engineer
CureFit
- Helped build an industry-leading CRM solution from scratch.
- Owned an in-house segmentation platform that has become the most adopted and largest-scale service at Curefit.
- Envisioned and implemented a cheaper and better alternative to Segment.io. The in-house segmentation platform I helped build was the first near-real-time segmentation engine in the world.
Founding Engineer
CureFit
- Led the back end for Cultgear engineering and built the eCommerce back end from scratch.
- Handled several areas of expertise, from the design and development of features in quick cycles to deployment for production, ensuring adherence to best practices.
- Worked on finding the right balance of current needs and long-term ideals and designing systems iteratively.
- Contributed to product management, designed core and innovative eCommerce features, developed the system, and led the implementation cycle with a team of three other engineers.
- Hired and grew the core engineering and product teams through a rigorous interviewing process, keeping high-quality standards.
Software Engineer
1mg
- Helped rewrite 1mg's complete codebase from Python to Ruby on Rails (RoR), which included defining a new system design, re-thinking business logic, identifying chunks on an extensive system, and planning the rewrite keeping downtime to a minimum.
- Contributed to rewriting the complete codebase of Droplet, a subsidiary of 1mg, moving from PHP to Ruby on Rails (RoR).
- Progressed to primary code reviewer just a few months after joining the team.
Software Engineer
FastFox
- Introduced a new repository that acts as the central library for all FastFox repositories and is used as a Node.js module.
- Researched, designed, and implemented a logging system to log all customer actions using RabbitMQ and MongoDB in collaboration with another developer.
- Implemented, in collaboration with another developer, a dynamic panel and back-end APIs for actions to be used by the requirement gathering team.
Experience
Custom eCommerce Store for Cult.fit
http://www.cult.fit/storeNear-real-time User-segmentation Platform
Co-Founder and CTO at Zecko
Codebase Rewrite
https://www.1mg.com/I also contributed to rewriting the complete codebase of Droplet, a subsidiary of 1mg, from PHP to RoR.
Software Engineering Work at Fastfox
http://fastfox.com/I was part of a team of two that spent time researching, designing, and implementing a logging system to log all actions of a customer / related to the customer by internal employees using RabbitMQ and MongoDB.
The team also led the implementation of a dynamic panel along with back-end APIs for the actions of the requirement-gathering team. The questions asked were highly dynamic based on customers' previous answers (back end + front end).
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad - Allahabad, India
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, REST APIs, jQuery, Shopify API, Sidekiq, OpenAPI, Typeform.io, React
Tools
NGINX, RSpec, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Amazon CloudWatch, Git, Zapier, cURL Command Line Tool, Front-end Build Tools, Wix, Postman, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Cron, Bubble, GitLab, Canvas, RabbitMQ, Bower Front-end Dependency Manager
Languages
Java, Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, GraphQL, CSS, HTML, HTML5, CoffeeScript, SQL, Java 11, Bash Script, YAML, XML, Markdown, Python, C++, Python 3
Frameworks
Spring Boot, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Spring, Spring MVC, Swagger, Jest, Scrapy, Tailwind CSS, Spring Security, Flask, Django, Ruby on Rails 5, Express.js, Next.js
Paradigms
Microservices, Microservices Architecture, Serverless Architecture, Enterprise Application Architecture, Unit Testing, Event-driven Architecture, Lambda Architecture, Back-end Architecture, Responsive, DevOps
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Shopify, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Ubuntu, Linux, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Java EE, Webflow, HubSpot, Docker
Storage
MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, JSON, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redis Cache, Relational Databases, Databases, Database Administration (DBA), Data Pipelines, MongoDB, Google Cloud
Other
Interviewing, Web Scraping, Scraping, Web Development, Full-stack, Back-office System Development, CTO, Architecture, APIs, Back-end, Technical Consulting, Headless Software, Cloud, Scalability, Third-party APIs, Security, Software Architecture, API Integration, Technical Writing, Payment APIs, Online Payments, Front-end, Technical Leadership, Software Design, Scalable Architecture, SDKs, Software Packaging, Documentation, Amazon RDS, Enterprise Architecture, Integration Testing, VM, GitOps, DevOps Engineer, Back-end Development, Roadmaps, Solution Architecture, Client-server Model, Data Analysis, IT Consulting, Startups, Distributed Systems, SaaS, eCommerce, Consulting, Pricing Consulting, Technical Architecture, Leadership, Low Latency, Multithreading, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), CI/CD Pipelines, Product Development, Estimations, Cloud Platforms, CRM APIs, Lambda Functions, API Connectors, Back-end Performance, Technical Documentation, Logistics, Analytics, Reports, IT Project Management, IT, Cloud Architecture, Ruby Gems, Writing & Editing, Front-end Development, Data Scraping, Large-scale Web Crawlers, Web Crawlers, Algorithms, Workflow, Dashboard Development, Integration, Responsiveness, Springbot, Data Engineering, Search Engines, Data Science, Chatbots, Forms, Design, No-code Development, Full-stack Development, UI Development, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), WebSockets
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