Hi, I'm Shijith Karumathil

Engineering Lead · Elixir/Phoenix

What I am all about.

Engineering Lead with 8+ years building backend systems in Elixir/Phoenix.

Since April 2025 I have led a 5-engineer team at Glific (Project Tech4Dev), an open-source WhatsApp chatbot platform used by 150+ NGOs. I own performance management, delivery process, observability and security, and I still write code: I moved inbound message processing to durable Oban jobs as the platform grew 3x in two months to 13M messages a month.

Before that I built search, performance and onboarding work at Mindvalley, back-office systems at BlockFi, and payments and search at Functionary Labs.

Expertise

Engineering Leadership

Performance management including promotion nominations, Agile ceremonies, PR and WIP limits, and a release checklist. Production deploys went from once every few weeks to at least 2 a week.

Backend at Scale

Elixir, Phoenix, Oban and PostgreSQL. Durable job processing, a separate clustered worker service, and backend CI cut from 18 minutes to 4.

Reliability & Security

Metrics-first observability with AppSignal, so problems that took 3 to 28 days to notice now show up on dashboards. Database SSL, audit logs and per-ticket read-only access.

AI in the Workflow

Brought Claude Code into the team's daily work with custom agents and shared skills. Integrated Google Gemini speech and our internal AI platform, Kaapi, into Glific.

Skills

Elixir/Phoenix
90%
Product Engineer
100%
Back-End Development
95%
REST API Development
95%
Ecto
90%
Ruby/Rails
45%
PostgreSQL
90%
Elasticsearch
50%
Redis
50%
Core PHP
45%
jQuery
35%
CDN
50%
MinIO
75%
Third Party Integrations
90%
Unit Testing
90%
Phoenix LiveView
90%

Also work with

  • Oban
  • GraphQL
  • React
  • TailwindCSS
  • BigQuery
  • Typesense
  • Algolia
  • GCP
  • AWS S3
  • Docker
  • Gigalixir
  • AppSignal
  • Claude Code
  • Google Gemini

Work Experience

Apr 2025 - Present

Engineering Lead

Glific (Project Tech4Dev)

Remote

  • Replaced a Poolboy worker pool with durable Oban jobs for inbound messages, so none are lost during deploys, as the platform grew 3x in two months to 13M messages a month.
  • Leading the split of background jobs into a clustered worker service, so worker CPU, DB pool size and queue limits scale independently of the web tier.
  • Integrated Google Gemini speech in 4+ Indian languages, the Kaapi AI platform, and Meta's WhatsApp Flows.
  • Cut backend CI time from 18 minutes to 4, and partitioned BigQuery tables so NGO analytics no longer scan entire tables.
  • Lead a 5-engineer team: performance management including promotions, Agile delivery, and production deploys from once every few weeks to at least 2 a week.
Oct 2022 - Apr 2025

Web Developer

Mindvalley

Remote

  • Led the search migration from Algolia to Typesense, cutting costs and increasing unique content discovery by 34%.
  • Raised the share of requests meeting the p90 latency target from 57% to 95% by optimizing GraphQL queries and API calls.
  • Led the marketing workflow migration from Maropost to Iterable, reducing errors by 12%.
Nov 2020 - Aug 2022

Software Engineer 3

BlockFi Inc.

Remote

  • Split the back-office monolith into microservices for scalability.
  • Reduced user-reported errors by 30% by finding and fixing bugs proactively.
Jun 2018 - Nov 2020

Product Engineer

Functionary Labs Pvt Ltd

Bengaluru, India

  • Integrated Razorpay payments and built Elasticsearch-powered search in Elixir/Phoenix.
  • Set up the GitLab CI/CD pipeline and mentored new Elixir developers.
Aug 2017 - Mar 2018

Junior PHP Developer

Shuan Tech Pvt Ltd

Bengaluru, India

Education

2013 - 2017

Bachelor Engineering, Electronics and Communication

Nehru Institute of Technology, Anna University

Tamilnadu, India

Interest

Motorcycles

Enjoy riding across the country.

Football

I love the beautiful game. Hardcore Manchester United fan. Doesn't hesistate to get on the grass myself.

Contact

Location
Kochi/Cochin
Kerala, India
Phone Number
+91 89436 50799
Email
shijithjayan@gmail.com