OnkarHoysala

Engineering leader building AI-powered commerce at Flash.co. Sixteen years shipping consumer tech and SaaS, reporting to CEOs and founders. I own tech and AI strategy, hiring, budget, delivery — all of it.

I've stayed hands-on throughout. I think AI just makes good things better, so I keep going back to the fundamentals — writing things down, designing before building, testing properly, keeping it simple, and getting out of good engineers' way.

Now

Head of Engineering

Flash AI

Run engineering end to end for Flash.co, an AI-powered shopping destination at ~1M MAU, reporting directly to the CEO. Rebuilt flash.co as an agent-run marketplace in 6 weeks, took availability to 99.99%, and cut AWS spend 45%. Also founded Buffy AI, an AI sales agent for Shopify stores — launched with 9 brands, then shut it down when the economics didn't work out.

Outcomes

  • Held tech at ₹2 of ₹11 blended CAC at ~1M MAU. Drove AWS cost down 45% over 18 months as the product evolved.
  • Scaled the consumer product to ~1M MAU. Took availability to 99.99% over 8–9 months and held it. Only 2 Sev0s in the last year, both from third-party outages.

Product

  • Built and shipped two product pivots. The first — shopping email and order-tracking app to an order-tracking agent plus a product-research agent — took about 4 months. The second, rebuilding flash.co as an AI-powered shopping destination where every function of a marketplace is run by agents, took 6 weeks.
  • Founded Buffy AI, an AI sales agent for Shopify stores. It went live with 9 stores and led to a marginal increase in conversion, but didn't make business sense, so we shut it down.

Team

  • Kept the engineering headcount budget constant across four financial years, focused on dense tech talent rather than headcount. The team went from 13 to a peak of 15, and is at 8 today.
  • Built lightweight processes focused on written specs, design-first instead of only PR reviews. Idea-to-POC went from weeks to 1-2 days. New-hire production push in less than a week.
  • Led the cross-org AI-native set up and took it past engineering — built tooling for business and marketing, ran training, and set up shared infrastructure so the whole org could work this way.

Before

2021 — 2023

Director of Engineering

Livspace

Part of technology leadership. Built and grew Growth, Sales, and Customer Portal engineering teams from scratch. ~20% reduction in CAC, 17% increase in organic leads, 99.99% p99 availability.

Outcomes

  • Owned the pre-fulfilment domain (half the engineering team), leading EMs and Staff Engineers. 2x Founders Award recipient.
  • ~20% reduction in CAC, 17% increase in organic leads, 12% increase in conversion, and 50% reduction in TAT for new country launches — via the all-things-home superapp, Fury (landing-page authoring), Quotes, and Inkpot (headless CMS).

Team

  • Led engineering hiring — design, calibration, career ladders. Halved time-to-offer; new engineers hit first production push in 2 weeks.

Platform

  • Met the p99 availability SLO of 99.99% for team microservices, 99.999% for key services. Refactored Java microservices to ~600 rps at <200ms p99 per pod, with no scaling — benchmarked with k6.
  • Cut consumer webapp load time from 15s to 1s and scaled the demand-gen stack to 3M visitors a month.
2017 — 2020

Lead Engineer

VideoKen

Full-stack lead for reporting, analytics, and integrations. Designed the stack to handle 10M+ API requests/day.

Role

  • Lead full-stack engineer for the reporting, analytics, and integrations dashboard.
  • Built the end-to-end tracking and analytics pipeline for VideoKen's AI Player product.

Scale

  • Built the stack to handle a production peak of ~3.5M API requests a day, load-tested to 10M.
2012 — 2016

Co-Founder

Fields of View

Built simulation software for policy research. Clients include Govt. of India, Govt. of Karnataka, and TU Delft.

Role

  • One of four co-founders. The company still operates a decade after my tenure.
  • Technical lead for software and research for about 70% of my time; the rest across grant funding, operations, and delivery. Headed finance when I left.

Funding & Delivery

  • Raised research grants from the Government of India, NWO (Dutch Research Council), and the Government of Karnataka, among others.
  • Built and delivered simulation software to the Dept. of Science and Technology (GoI), Government of Karnataka, and TU Delft.
2010 — 2012

Research Associate

CSTEP

GIS-based disaster management simulation for DRDO. Software development and research.

Education

2014 — 2017

MS (by Research), Information Technology

IIIT-Bangalore

2006 — 2010

B.E. in Computer Science

Visvesvaraya Technological University

Connect

LinkedIn Email CV