Engineer, designer, once a PM.

I started out as a frontend engineer who designed what he built. At Panoptic Analytics I designed and shipped web apps for startup funding data, and launched Explorebit.io, a startup and investor discovery platform. Next, at PrblmSlvd Web Solutions, I designed and built business websites and HTML email signatures that had to render in 30 email clients. (Tables are still undefeated.)

At Kawa Space I joined as a Frontend Engineer and was promoted to Product Manager within 6 months. I led 3 frontend engineers and 2 designers building Kawa Studio, which turned satellite imagery into farm-monitoring insights. I owned roadmaps for 5 products and ran the customer discovery that led us into a new customer segment.

Product taught me to start with the problem. Then I went back to engineering, and took that habit with me.

At Appsmith, an open-source low-code platform with 40k+ GitHub stars, I was a Design System Engineer working on widgets, the building blocks of every app. My widget work drove a 28% increase in widget adoption (across all widget work), from reskinning 10 core widgets to migrating 6 to the new Widget Design System and shipping Widget Discoverability. I built the Code Scanner widget and shipped 64 merged PRs.

The project I’m proudest of is App Navigation 2.0. The old navigation felt bolted on. I led a backend engineer, a designer and a PM to rebuild it with sidebar, stacked and inline styles, live preview and logo upload, backward-compatible with thousands of existing apps. It’s now the default in every Appsmith app.

Then came Radius, a San Francisco real estate brokerage, where I built agent workflows in React and public listing pages in Next.js that cut load times by 60%+ (how I approached it). After that I rebuilt the real-time chat of an AI sales platform at Saleschat.pro.

From August 2025 to October 2026 I co-led the frontend at PaySecure, a PCI DSS Level 1 payment orchestration platform. I owned the frontend of its Cashier, live for 50+ merchants and 80K+ daily transactions, and I was the final review gate before anything reached production. I also drove the migration of 70+ merchant-facing modules from a legacy Thymeleaf monolith to a React 19 and TypeScript SPA, on a platform I co-architected with my co-lead.

On the side I built BillTick, a PWA for recurring monthly bills. It replaced a Notion template and my habit of cross-checking three sources to confirm a payment.

Keep it simple. I live by KISS. The code I’m proudest of fixed two problems at once, stale measurements and performance, in a few lines instead of a long, complex rewrite.

Discovery before solutions. A few months into being a PM, my CEO told me my solutions were solid, but I jumped to them before I understood the problem. Hard to hear. So I made myself talk to at least 5 users before proposing anything, and asked open questions instead of leading ones. One of those conversations led to a pivot into a new customer segment. I still work this way as an engineer.

Communication over cleverness. Early on I chased clever code. My most successful projects turned out to be the ones where I understood the problem, wrote down the tradeoffs and kept everyone in the loop. App Navigation 2.0 was complex to build, but that upfront work is what made it succeed.

Written down, async friendly. Four of my roles were fully remote. Good async work comes down to writing things down clearly, so that’s what I do.

Work I’d sign my name to. Craft matters to me, with pragmatic tradeoffs: accessible, consistent, reviewed and built to last.

Coffee, mostly. Espresso on a De’Longhi Dedica EC685, a V60 when there’s time, and cold brew steeped in the fridge.

I have played guitar for about four years, mostly meditative fingerstyle. I played piano for years, until a friend accidentally short-circuited it.

I travel through food, then try to recreate the dishes at home.

I’ve put a lot of hours into Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is partly why this site looks like a cockpit, and I hope to get a private pilot licence someday.

On a clear night you’ll find me skygazing. It’s part of what made working at a space-tech startup so much fun.

Want to talk? Write to me at dhruvikn@gmail.com or send a message.