Hey!

I started out writing Ruby on Rails in Jaipur in 2012, building lending software for a small company nobody had heard of. I was good at shipping and quietly frustrated: the things we shipped worked, and people still struggled to use them. That gap is the reason I became a designer. I did not leave engineering behind so much as add the missing half, and I still think the ability to build is part of the craft.

The company was Punchh, and I became its first designer. I built the design team from nothing, hand-coded the website, and shipped loyalty apps for restaurant brands in the US that I had never set foot in. Punchh was later acquired for half a billion dollars. Then came Ola, where I designed Shuttle, Outstation and Share Express from scratch, and learned my most useful lesson the hard way: a trip to Gurgaon to watch real commuters use Shuttle sent us straight back to the drawing board. Seven years at Amazon followed, from Amazon Pay to Alexa shopping to seller tools, working with teams across six countries and growing from a designer into someone responsible for other designers.

Today I am Director of Design at Pine Labs and Head of Design at Setu, leading a team of eight across payments and India's fintech infrastructure. Most of my week is spent on the unglamorous things that make a design team work: deciding what we will not do, holding the quality bar for a payment device in a shop I will never visit, and building the AI-native ways of working that let a small team think more and produce faster. I drove Setu's AI initiative, and I use these tools every day myself. This site was rebuilt with them.

A few things I believe, fourteen years in. Design leads development and development informs design. The best interfaces disappear. Trust is the product, especially when the product is someone's money. And you learn more at a shop counter than in a dashboard.

Outside of work I am curious about art and architecture, I plan trips around museums, and I am at my best with friends and family around a table. If any of this sounds like the kind of work or the kind of person you would want to talk to, my inbox is open.