Associate Director of Engineering · PickYourTrail

I build the platform your
team is working around.

Every company I've worked at had a gap between what the team was trying to do and the tools they had to do it. Not a product gap. An internal one. I kept ending up as the person who built that missing piece.

At Contus it was getting client sites live on AWS the minute they signed. At BORN it was a migration script that moved 30 million production records to a new platform. At Cognizant it was asset tooling that made 40+ brand sites maintainable by a small team. At PickYourTrail it became the CRM that runs how 400 people work, built and maintained by a team of 20.

14 years later, that's still the work I find most interesting. And with AI now part of how I build, what used to need a team I can often do alone.

14 years experience Chennai, India Associate Director of Engineering 20-person engineering team 10× Impact award · 2022 & 2025 4 companies [email protected] github.com/sunel linkedin.com/in/sunel
About

I got into engineering because I liked making things work. That part hasn't changed. What has changed is the scale: it's not just the code anymore, it's the system around the code, the team that maintains it, the decisions that hold it together two years later. The problems that interest me now are the ones where the technical and the organisational are tangled together and you can't solve one without thinking about the other.

At PickYourTrail, the first thing I built was the core system for how sales, operations, and customer support actually work. The original version held together until it didn't. When it started breaking down I rebuilt it with better decisions. Along the way came a design system that stopped the same UI choices from being relitigated every sprint, an allocation engine that nobody had thought to call an engine until one existed, and an AI layer that actually changed how people work rather than sitting in a demo. None of these were on a roadmap when I joined. They were just gaps.

I also build things outside of work. A live trading engine running real capital. A macOS developer tool my team uses daily. Earlier there were open source packages too: a modular framework for Laravel that I started and stepped away from when the problem it solved became less relevant, and an EAV port that came from years inside Magento's EAV architecture. I understood why it existed, where it got slow, and what a cleaner version in Laravel would look like. All of it came from the same habit: building something real forces you to think in a way that building something safe doesn't.

The management side and the engineering side are not separate tracks. I learned that early at Cognizant leading a team of five: the real work was spotting what each person was capable of, putting the right work in front of them, and pushing them into areas they hadn't tried yet. That approach scaled. The 20-person team I lead now is structured to be full-stack, not split by specialisation. People grow by doing work outside their usual area, not by staying in a lane. I stay close to the code for the same reason: the moment your sense of what is hard comes only from what gets brought to you, your thinking starts falling behind the team you are supposed to be leading.

Vortex came from the same frustration. We had multiple dev environments that kept falling out of sync. When a feature went live, the people working on other branches didn't know, and by the time they found out there were conflicts everywhere. No proper release cycle meant every release was stressful and unpredictable. I built Vortex to automate it: PR creation, branch syncing, release pipeline, Slack notifications. Releases became boring. That's exactly what they should be.

One of the first things I did at both Cognizant and PickYourTrail was work on the baseline of how code was written. Both codebases were hard to navigate and harder to onboard into. I introduced SOLID, DRY, KISS and patterns like Builder, Adapter, and Chain of Responsibility, not through documents but through code reviews and working alongside the team. Over time the same people who wrote the messy code started writing things other people could actually build on.

Selected work

Projects

A selection of platforms, products, and systems, most in production.

Flagship

Also built

LLM fine-tuning pipeline

ML Pipeline

Turns a compressed support-chat database export into a fine-tuned model for travel customer service. The trained adapter weights are in production use.

Three stages: the first streams the raw SQL file, groups messages into conversations by participant, and sends each conversation to an LLM to extract a structured training example with an input, expected output, and intent label. The second stage cleans up inconsistent intent labels into a canonical set of 31 categories and filters out low-quality examples. The third automates GPU training on EC2. For scale, the dataset is split into 1,100 shards processed in parallel across RunPod serverless endpoints — work is distributed via filesystem state files with atomic operations rather than a coordination service. A cost estimation step runs before any LLM calls are made.

GoAxolotl + LoRARunPodEC2Alpaca format

AI operations agents platform

AI Platform

A set of AI agents for internal trip operations — customer issue analysis, revenue operations analytics, allocation Q&A, and booking support. Each agent runs both as a command-line tool and as an MCP server.

The agents keep responses compact by default and expand to full detail only when explicitly requested — important for keeping AI context windows efficient when tools return large datasets. Analytics run in-process against CSV data without needing a database server. Intent classification uses keyword lists and pattern matching before touching the LLM — routing simple lookup queries away from the more expensive multi-step reasoning path. Shared authentication and response management are packaged as internal libraries reused across all agents.

FastMCPDuckDBDSPyLangGraphKubernetes

Self-hosted AI engineering team

AI Infrastructure

13 AI agents with defined roles (squad lead, architect, React dev, Python dev, QA, database optimizer, and others) collaborating through a shared task and communication backend with event-driven triggers and YAML-defined workflows.

Each agent has a stable personality and long-term memory that persist globally, but keeps its working context isolated per project. Model selection is tiered by task complexity — heavier reasoning models for architecture and creative tasks, lighter models for routine checks and scheduling. Agents are configured to act on assignments directly rather than asking for confirmation at each step, which is the default LLM behaviour and needs to be explicitly overridden in agent systems. Inference runs on self-hosted hardware to keep per-task cost at zero.

ConvexvLLM on RunPodReact + ViteYAML workflows

Atom design system

Design System

A full proprietary design system built in 2022, before shadcn/ui existed. 11 packages, 650+ custom SVG icons in two size scales, web and React Native. Deployed across multiple products.

Layered architecture: theming and design tokens at the foundation, primitive components (layout, forms, typography) in the middle, and composite components (dialogs, drawers, data tables, autocomplete, multi-select) on top. Radix UI handled the accessibility primitive layer and was kept constant when the styling approach later moved from CSS-in-JS to Tailwind, which turned out to be the right architectural bet.

Stitches.jsRadix UITurborepotsupChangesetsReact Native

Git Flow automation — Vortex

Developer Tooling

Web application that automates Git Flow branch management across GitHub repositories — automated pull request creation, merge conflict detection and retry, release pipeline, hotfix handling, and Slack notifications.

Includes an MCP endpoint so AI agents can interact with the release pipeline directly. Three-tier test coverage: unit tests, HTTP integration tests, and a full browser test suite that exercises the release flow end-to-end.

LaravelLivewireMaryUILaravel ReverbLaravel MCPPHPStan

People ops platform — Lockerroom

Internal Platform

Internal HRIS for PickYourTrail covering appraisal cycles, peer/manager/founder reviews, OKRs, one-on-ones, resignation workflows, exit checklists, and employee profile exports.

Server-rendered admin handles broad data management; specific high-value flows (performance reviews, goal tracking, offboarding) are built as React components bootstrapped from Blade with pre-loaded initial state. A targeted modernisation approach: upgrade the surfaces that benefit most without an all-at-once rewrite.

LaravelNovaReactTailwindHorizonDocker + ECR + K8s
By the numbers

Impact

Platforms built under real constraints — reliability targets, throughput requirements, team size, infrastructure cost.

98%
Uptime
Plato CRM · up from 70%
3s
Response time
Plato CRM · down from 30s
3B+
Messages
Chat platform · sent & received
400
Concurrent chats
Chat platform · minimal infra
60k/hr
Queue jobs
Plato CRM · peak throughput
90%
LLM cost reduction
Self-hosted Llama vs managed APIs
30+
Features shipped
Plato CRM · one year
7 → 3
Team efficiency
Same output · 4 engineers reallocated

Early adopter

GLM Kimi Minimax OpenRouter Kilo Code Pi Dev
Career

Experience

2022 – present
PickYourTrail
Associate Director of Engineering

Built the internal CRM platform from the ground up: original system and its architectural rewrite. Leads a 20-person engineering team. 10× Impact award 2022 and 2025.

2016 – 2022
Cognizant
Lead

5.5 years building and maintaining web properties for Newell Brands, a Fortune 500 company with brands including Coleman, Rubbermaid, Sharpie, and Calphalon. Enterprise-scale web engineering across a large multi-brand portfolio. Difference Maker Q4 2019, E-Perfectionist Q1 2019; both customer-recognized.

2015 – 2016
BORN Group
Software Engineer

Enterprise e-commerce for international brands: Xcite.com (Alghanim Electronics, UAE), Dakine, Mapemall (MAP Retail, Indonesia), Mothercare Middle East (Alshaya). Magento-based, multi-region deployments.

2012 – 2014
Contus
Application Developer

Magento extensions, iOS apps, and web platforms: hotel reservation systems, marketplace extensions, social networks. Star Performer 2012, Best Techiee 2013.

Stack & focus

What I work with

Internal platform engineering

Systems close to revenue and operations: CRM, HRIS, finance workflows, allocation engines. Comfortable owning a platform end-to-end across years, including the rewrites.

AI systems engineering

Multi-agent orchestration, MCP servers, RAG pipelines, LLM fine-tuning, self-hosted inference. Building AI infrastructure rather than wrapping managed APIs.

E-commerce

Enterprise e-commerce across Magento, WooCommerce, and SFCC. Multi-region deployments for international brands.

React Native + mobile SDKs

Three production apps bootstrapped from scratch. Authored a reusable chat SDK consumed across multiple products. Full native ownership including Android and iOS config.

Developer tooling

macOS runtime manager, Git automation platform, Chrome extension, PDF rendering service. Builds the tools the team needs when they don't exist.

Travel domain

Booking lifecycle, costing, compliance, multi-modal travel, on-trip support, corporate and consumer UX, across product and back-office.

Languages
TypeScriptPythonPHPGoRust
Frontend
ReactNext.jsViteTanStack Query / Table / Routershadcn/uiTailwindJotai
Mobile
React NativeExpoFastlaneFirebase + NotifeeRazorpay
Backend
LaravelFastAPIFastifyLivewireGraphQL + PothosPrisma
E-commerce
MagentoWooCommerceSFCC
AI / ML
CrewAILangGraphDSPyMCPAxolotl + LoRAvLLMpgvector
Data / DB
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBSQLiteDuckDBRedis
Infra
Kubernetes + Helm + ArgoCDDockerTraefikTemporalCelery + BullMQOpenTelemetry
Self-hosted
SockudoGlitchTipTypesenseMinIOvLLM
Education

Academic background

2008 – 2012
Jawaharlal Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Computer Science
2004 – 2008
St Thomas Higher Secondary School
Computer Science
Open source

A bias toward open

Most of the stack is open source: Kubernetes, Laravel, FastAPI, Prisma, React, pgvector, DuckDB, and the rest. Prefer self-hosting over managed when the protocol is open and the cost difference is real: Sockudo instead of Pusher, GlitchTip instead of Sentry, Typesense instead of Algolia, vLLM instead of vendor inference APIs. That preference extends to contributing back where it makes sense.

mods-framework / mods

Early Laravel-based modular framework — theming, layout, application areas, modular architecture.

eav

Laravel EAV library — flexible data models with a clean, upgrade-safe API.

layout-core / aspect-me

Upgrade-safe layout abstraction and AOP-style method interception for PHP.

runpod-sglang-serverless

Serverless deployment for self-hosted LLM inference. OpenAI-compatible API without managed infrastructure.

Recent Writing

Notes from systems, teams, and tools.

The blog goes deeper into the kinds of systems on this page: internal platforms, AI infrastructure, mobile SDKs, self-hosted tooling, and engineering leadership.

Jun 27, 2026 13 min read

Multi-agent systems: what we improved

Managing asyncio boundaries with CrewAI Flows, destination knowledge with local embeddings, reducing data-collection to a single turn, and bridging CrewAI's memory system to pgvector.

ai
#ai#agents#crewai