Looking for a job

Suraj Zala

@surajzala

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I'm a back-end software developer based out of Gujarat, India.

India

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What I'm looking for

I have experience in both small teams in startups trying to build their first release, and with feature work in large organizations with long-term roadmaps. I enjoy working on software designed carefully with the user in mind. I like getting to learn new tools and approaches for building solutions.

I have extensive experience in back-end development in teams and orgs of different sizes spanning multiple time zones, and have worked on creating solutions from scratch as well as refactoring and optimising existing solutions for better performance at scale. I believe in choosing the right tool for the job, and like learning new skills/tools/languages given the chance.

Over the last six years, I've worked on:

the back-end for a CRM built around chatbots at Rheo.bot
a policy-as-code execution service for a CapitalFloat’s credit line calculation system
building new features and automation services for BASF CoSSBot, a document search engine for a multinational chemical manufacturer
designing and building a search service for BASF Care360, a B2B e-commerce platform
feature development for Teamworks a VC-funded startup
an Agentic Application platform for Cognida.ai, another VC-funded startup

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Senior Software Developer

Cognida.ai

Feb 2024 - Jan 2025 (11 months)

As a Senior Software Developer at Cognida.ai, I contributed to the Platform Development team, focusing on LLM-based applications and standardizing developer practices. I built proof-of-concepts for B2B customers and collaborated on the Agentic Automation Platform, enhancing features like scheduling and email integrations.

fastAPI Temporal gRPC PostgreSQL CouchDB Redis Docker Kubernetes Grafana Azure OpenAI O365 Socket.IO

Software Engineer

smartSense Solutions

Feb 2021 - Sep 2023 (2 years 7 months)

I joined smartSense Solutions as a software engineer in backend development. I worked on designing and implementing solutions in multiple domains, from simple CRUD APIs for customer facing UIs to data ingestion and processing automations for search engines processing and indexing globally generated product data, work that measurably moved the bottom line for the product in some way.

Python Flask fastAPI Kubernetes Argo

Software Developer

Rheodigital

Jul 2018 - Nov 2020 (2 years 4 months)

I joined Rheo as the third software developer in the team, tasked with building out the back-end for their core product, a chatbot integration for Facebook Messenger. Over two and a half years at Rheo, I worked on designing the architecture for the backend and building out the chatbot service, extending it into a CRM product with a full chat backend that could serve multiple front-ends.

Python Flask MongoDB Heroku Socket.IO