About

Karan Kumar is an experienced Lead Engineer with over 8 years of relevant experience in the field. He is currently working as a Founding/Lead Software Engineer at qoohoo, a next-generation creator economy platform where he is leading the technical direction of the company. As the first technical hire, he is responsible for leading various business-critical services such as API, subscriptions, payments, payouts, 1:1 and 1:M chat services, on-demand video transcoding pipelines, 1:1 and 1:M live video streaming, analytics tracking services, and many more. He is also responsible for leading the technical designs of APIs, DB schemas, HLD, and LLDs for all the services. As a core systems architect, Karan is responsible for planning and setting up infrastructure for highly available systems, setting up entire CI/CD system from scratch, integrating systems monitoring tools, finding bottlenecks with APM and improving overall throughput for backend services. He has also collaborated with functional teams (mobile, web, and product) to get the deliverables out to users as fast as possible. Karan has identified different sets of business scaling problems and streamlined engineering processes to increase productivity for the team. He is also leading a team of many engineers, mentoring around technical and non-technical aspects and cultivating an open space for cross-team collaboration. He is an integral part of the hiring committee, conducting interviews for technical team hires. Prior to qoohoo, Karan worked at Instawork as a Senior Software Engineer where he coordinated with stakeholders and built product features that drove the company's OKRs. He also co-authored and implemented ETL pipeline, designed and developed a dashboard for monitoring, improved developer productivity by co-authoring internal serverless framework, migrated existing lambda functions into framework, and improved user onboarding experience and conversion by performance optimizations. He has also worked at Lovemyskool as a Chief Technology Officer where he converted raw product features into technical requirements by working closely with CEO and CFO, headed the backend, frontend, and mobile team (iOS & Android), and increased team bandwidth by growing engineering headcount from 2 to 6. Karan holds a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree in Mechanical Engineering from JSS Academy of Technical Education Karnataka and a Science degree from Delhi Public School, Vadodara. He has a strong technical skill set that includes AWS, test, UI, mobile, backend, React Native, CI/CD, product