Building at Mando · open to interesting problems

Rishikesh S.

Founding Software Engineer

I'm a software engineer who owns products end to end — the schema, the interface, and everything that has to work between them. Founding engineer at Mando today. Before that, two years on real-time trading systems, where being slow was the same as being wrong.

View my work Download resume

rishikesh@portfolio — zsh

years shipping

products shipped 0→1

open source tools

languages in production

01 — about

Who I am

I studied Chemical Engineering at IIT Madras, which taught me to think in systems, flows and balances long before I thought in APIs. Somewhere between a process simulation assignment and a hostel-room Android app, software won.

What I like is the part most teams hand off. A booking slot that is wrong by an hour, a webhook that fires twice, a query that is fine until the 95th percentile — those bugs live between layers, and the only reliable way to kill them is to own both sides. Trading systems taught me the other half: a latency budget makes you honest, because either the number moved or it didn't.

Outside work I write small tools I actually want to use: leak, a terminal subscription manager in Go; deadfall, an npm CLI that finds React components nothing renders; a weather CLI that draws animated ASCII scenes. I follow cricket closely enough that building an NRR and playoff-scenario engine for the IPL felt like a reasonable way to spend a weekend.

02 — experience

Work history

Five roles, one habit: own the thing end to end and leave a number behind.

PresentSep 2024 - Present Remote

Founding Software Engineer

Mando

First engineer. Five product surfaces from first commit in under two years, on a stack I chose and still run.

Built the natural language search and conversational AI layer over Workday's knowledge base — retrieval, ranking and cited answer generation — so enterprise users get an answer instead of a list of documents
Shipped the entire expert-session path alone: time-zone-correct booking, live video on Azure Communication Services, in-call controls, recording, and a browser-based editor for trimming and annotating the footage afterwards
Built the service management platform underneath it — ticket intake, routing, expert assignment, resolution — plus a Chrome extension that records a workflow once and writes the step-by-step documentation from it
Made the product buyable: Stripe subscriptions, checkout, invoicing and webhook-driven entitlement, which turned a demo into the company's first paid tier
Run the whole stack myself — Next.js and Tailwind on the front, FastAPI and PostgreSQL behind it, Terraform for every environment — with no handoffs between layers to lose things in

Next.jsFastAPIPostgreSQLTerraformStripeAzure Communication ServicesChrome ExtensionsLLMs

Jul 2022 - Sep 2024 Chennai, India

Software Engineer

Quantitative Brokers

Real-time trading systems for a quantitative execution firm — order monitoring, risk control and order entry, where every millisecond is somebody's money.

Designed an order monitoring system handling 200 messages/sec of 800-1000 bytes from multiple upstream sources
Cut application load time from ~40 seconds to under 1 second by moving data loading server-side
Reduced latency by 20% and CPU usage by 50% on the critical path of the order entry application
Implemented DV01-based risk calculations for CASH instruments, improving cash stream revenue by 5%
Built real-time aggregation and dynamic market data ladders for desk analysts

AngularNode.js.NETPostgreSQLReal-time Systems

May 2021 - Jul 2021 Chennai, India

Software Development Intern

Quantitative Brokers

Prototypes for desktop interop and market data visualisation that went on to ship.

Built a desktop integration prototype with OpenFin, sharing context across four separate applications
Developed an Angular app plotting financial curves from a live kdb+ database using Highcharts

AngularOpenFinkdb+Highcharts

Feb 2021 - May 2021 Remote

Android App Developer

Prescribe

A healthcare app for patient intake and feedback.

Built an Android app for collecting patient details and surfacing the feedback collected
Used Firebase for API endpoints and a custom notification system
Instrumented the app to analyse user interaction at each step

AndroidFirebaseJavaMobile

May 2020 - Jul 2020 Remote

Software Development Intern

Workfence Technologies

Workplace safety and attendance tooling during the pandemic.

Built a social-distancing mobile app paired with a hardware distance-measuring solution
Built a geofencing-based attendance system and a visualisation interface that scales from 1,000 to 100,000 users

AndroidMobileGeofencingUI/UX

03 — projects

Things I've built

Tools I wanted to exist, so I wrote them. Two of these you can install right now with one command.

PRJ_01 open source · installable

leak — Terminal Subscription Manager

Mark. Sweep. Save.

Subscriptions are the financial equivalent of a memory leak: you sign up, forget, and months later a zombie process is still draining your account. leak is a local-first TUI that tracks recurring spend, audits it, and tells you what to cancel. Single Go binary, no account, no server, no telemetry.

$ brew install RishikeshSreekumar/tap/leak

Key highlight

Ships as a real product, not a repo: Homebrew tap, an install script, prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux and Windows on amd64 and arm64, semver releases and CI on every push.

GoBubble TeaTUISQLiteHomebrewCI/CD

Releases Source

PRJ_02 open source · installable

deadfall — Dead Component Detector

Find the dead React components. Prove it before you delete them.

A CLI that parses a Next.js codebase with ts-morph, builds the component usage graph, and reports every component nothing actually renders. Exits non-zero when anything is dead, so the same command doubles as a CI gate. Generates an interactive HTML report to explore the graph. Never touches your code unless you pass --fix.

$ npx deadfall check ./my-next-app

Key highlight

App Router aware static analysis over the whole import graph — no server, no build step, no code changes. Published on npm and runnable with a single npx command.

TypeScriptNode.jsts-morphStatic Analysisnpm

View on npm Source

PRJ_03

FanPark — IPL Playoff Race Tracker

Pick a result. Watch the table move.

A companion app for the IPL 2026 season. Pick your team and get a dashboard of fixtures, form and net run rate; then play a result forward — Match Impact recomputes NRR and the points table, and Playoff Race answers whether the top four is still reachable. Built because arguing about qualification scenarios is better with the arithmetic done.

Key highlight

NRR is the part every fan gets wrong: it is computed over full quota overs, not overs faced, and an all-out side is charged the whole 20. Getting that right is what makes a projected table trustworthy.

Next.jsTypeScriptSupabasePostgreSQL

Live demo Source

PRJ_04

Rubik's Cube Solver

Scan a real cube. Watch it solve itself.

Paint the stickers, generate a scramble, or point your webcam at a real cube — then watch an animated, step-by-step solution on a 3D model you can orbit. Kociemba's two-phase algorithm runs in a Web Worker so the UI never drops a frame. Installable as a PWA and works offline after first load.

Key highlight

Physically impossible cubes are rejected with the actual reason — miscount, wrong centre, twisted corner, flipped edge, swap parity — instead of a generic failure.

Next.jsThree.jsWeb WorkersPWAComputer Vision

private repo — happy to walk through it

04 — education

Foundations

2018 - 2022 B.Tech Chennai, India

Chemical Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

Four years of thinking in flows, feedback loops and steady states — the same instincts I now apply to distributed systems

CGPA 8.58 / 10 All India Rank 2275 · JEE Advanced 2018Rank 5 in Kerala · KEAM 2018

05 — open source

The shelf

Smaller things, all public. Weekend-sized problems that were more interesting than they looked.

weather-cast Go

Animated ASCII weather in the terminal — a scene per condition, day/night palettes, 12h sparkline, 5-day strip. Single binary, no API key.

RishikeshSreekumar/nimbus

YT Music Romanizer TypeScript

Offline Chrome extension that romanizes non-Latin YouTube Music lyrics — Tamil, Devanagari, Hangul, kana — one script run at a time, so a failing engine degrades only its own run.

RishikeshSreekumar/youtube_music_lyrics

Marvel Nexus Astro

MCU chronology as a story-dependency graph: 95 titles, cycle validation at startup, watched-state in the URL. Astro shell, React island.

RishikeshSreekumar/marvel_nexus

Lift Simulation Python

Discrete-event simulation of sky-lobby lift systems: BFS routing across banks, collective-control dispatch, transfers as real waits, measured against an unrestricted baseline fleet.

RishikeshSreekumar/lift_simulation

Open GitHub →

06 — skills