Engineering that pays for itself
My teams are measured in revenue, not story points. I've owned a $60M revenue line and a $2M budget, and I plan roadmaps the way a general manager would — what we build has to move a business number.
Senior Engineering Manager · Yelp · Hamburg
Moin! I'm Rishabh 
I build engineering teams the business can count on.
Two teams of my own, a four-team technical roadmap — 35 engineers across four countries — a $60M revenue line, and a $2M budget. Entry-level engineer to senior leadership in four years, and I still read the diffs.
I still think in systems — I've just swapped services and APIs for people and roadmaps. The ones I build now have feelings, vacations, and career goals.
0
Engineers across four teams whose technical roadmap I direct
$0M
Annual revenue my org is accountable for
$0M
Department budget I own and plan
0
Years from entry-level engineer to senior engineering leadership
What I bring
Four things I'm good at
Teams that outlast me
I hire carefully, write plans down, and build feedback systems so the team runs fine when I'm on vacation. If I'm the bottleneck, something's broken — half my job is making sure someone could replace me.
Still technical
I came up through backend infrastructure and security tooling. I don't commit daily anymore, but I read the diffs, sit in design reviews, and can smell a bad architecture from the doorway.
Influence past the org chart
Executive stakeholders, cross-org programs, conference stages, community meetups — the job doesn't stop at my two teams, and the interesting problems usually live between teams anyway.
Track record
Where I've been
The specifics, employer by employer. The short version: every place got a bigger lever than the last.
Entry-level engineer to one of Yelp's youngest Senior Engineering Managers, against ~90 managers averaging 10 years of experience.
Senior Engineering Manager
Sep 2023 — Present- Run two teams (11 people) behind Yelp's claim experiences — how business owners find, claim, and join Yelp — accountable for a $2M budget and $60M in revenue.
- Direct the technical roadmap for a four-team group: 35 engineers across the UK, US, Canada, and Germany.
- Lead AI adoption for Yelp engineering, driving org-specific use cases across a group of seven teams.
- Built the in-house platform behind Yelp's engineer-growth framework — and kicked off the engineering-leaders working group around it.
- Mentor engineers and engineering managers on career growth.
Engineering Manager
Jan 2022 — Aug 2023- Took new business acquisition from 7% to 18% in 18 months by fixing funnel bottlenecks with guided digital onboarding.
- Shipped 10+ product features — including a 97% improvement in partner-API worst-case performance — growing acquisition revenue from $45M to $60M.
- Introduced a 360° peer-feedback process across a team of six; development velocity rose 40%.
Software Engineer
Jun 2019 — Dec 2021- Re-architected the business acquisition product around Yelp's long-term B2B vision, cutting maintenance from 2,100 to 800 hours a year.
- Organised and emceed weekly tech talks for 1.5 years (50+ attendance) and represented Yelp at three conferences (500+).
Non-profit tech school for locals and newcomers without access to digital education.
Volunteer Teacher
Aug 2024 — Present- Teach free coding and computer courses, paired with a career program that connects students to Germany's digital industry.
Backend engineer on the mobile platform at India's most valued B2B SaaS company at the time ($4B).
Software Engineer, Backend Mobile Platform
Jul 2018 — Apr 2019- Shipped three projects with the Engineering Director to support newly launched mobile devices — two weeks ahead of competitors.
- Owned production health for 5,000+ real devices on the Device Cloud: self-healing hosts, automated onboarding, Ansible everywhere.
- Automated away manual IT maintenance, cutting mean time to recovery by 40%.
R&D intern on the iPhone chipset.
Software Engineer, R&D Intern
Jan 2018 — Jun 2018- Re-engineered the chipset's error-detection module to run 40× faster — engineers were still talking about it after I left.
- Built a log-analytics pipeline and anomaly dashboards used by Intel teams worldwide, saving 5,600 engineer-hours a month.
Full-stack intern on hazir, an internal communication tool.
Software Developer Intern
May 2017 — Jun 2017- Built a natural-language bot for processing employee requests, plus the event-notification framework behind it.
- Delivered 20 bug-free features to production in two months — TDD, CI/CD, the whole catechism.
Winter of Security — selected top 3 of 300+ information security experts worldwide.
Software Engineer, Winter of Security
Oct 2016 — Mar 2017- Co-authored ssh-scan, a Ruby security-auditing CLI, with the Mozilla team in the USA.
- Built its asynchronous queue-worker API service, integrated into the Mozilla Observatory — about a million requests a month.
Summer of Code with openSUSE — top 6% of ~20,000 contributors worldwide.
Software Developer, Summer of Code
Apr 2016 — Aug 2016- Built OSEM's online ticket payments on Ruby on Rails to PCI-A compliance, weighing flexible vs. secure payment designs.
- Shipped with a distributed openSUSE team via TDD and pair programming; presented at the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg.
B.Eng in Information Technology, first class with distinction (8.18/10).
Outside the classroom
- National rank 1 of 500+ engineers in the DigitalOcean Code Sprint; Google India Challenge Scholar; Web Summit scholarship (top 100); India Innovation Challenge finalist (top 0.05%).
- Ran the campus computer club and a 4k-user network community, and spoke at ACM and IET (UK) chapter events — my first taste of herding engineers.
References
What people say
"I was impressed with the rapid growth in his skill set and the milestones he and his team accomplished — eventually creating the operational back-end for the Mozilla SSH Observatory."
"A very structured approach to problem solving. Exceptional communication skills, openness for feedback, and passion toward great software."
"Rishabh brought new ideas to the table and implemented them through his code. The tool helped increase our team's productivity tremendously."
From LinkedIn recommendations.
Also
Beyond the day job
ssh-scan · Mozilla
Co-authored a network security tool — 140k+ downloads, 38M+ scans — building the CLI and its queue-worker API backend, and leading a seven-person team across the USA and India. Top 3 of 300+ in Mozilla Winter of Security.
observatory.mozilla.org →OSEM · Google Summer of Code
Built openSUSE's PCI-compliant online ticketing, lifting registration conversion by 20%. Top 6% of ~20,000 contributors worldwide; presented at the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg.
events.opensuse.org →ErgoNames
Co-founded a digital identity product on the Ergo blockchain with four open-source contributors. Runner-up at ErgoHack V ($20k).
ergonames.io →SEVAK ventilator
Co-founded a bootstrapped Covid-19 ventilator with five mechanical, electrical & biomedical engineers — functional in six months. Also built tuRing, a low-energy pulse-oximetry smart ring for asthmatic patients.
kseng.co.in/s-evak →Teaching & community
Volunteer teacher at ReDI School, a non-profit bringing free tech education to newcomers in Germany; part of the 2hearts community for immigrant tech talent; emceed Yelp Hamburg's tech talks for 1.5 years.
redi-school.org →Away from the screen
Running (half-marathon best: 2h10m), cooking North Indian dinners for friends — and guitar and vocals in an indie-rock cover band. The strings in the hero aren't just a metaphor.
Hear me play →Harvard Business School · Organizational Leadership
Case-based program for experienced leaders, completed through HBS Online — setting and communicating direction, influencing through other managers, generating organizational alignment, and engineering change.
Verify certificate →HarvardX · CS50
Harvard's Introduction to Computer Science, completed through edX in 2016 — signed by David Malan, like every good engineering origin story.
Verify certificate →