Experienced engineering leader with a people-first approach.

You can expect experience-based, opinionated, iconoclastic writing. I love all things engineering, products, startups, and careers, which is reflected in my writing.

Recent roles

  • Co-founder and CEO at Superlinear, a Consulting and Services boutique.

  • CTO at Tungsten, UAE’s top institutional digital asset custody platform

  • CTO at CoLearn, Indonesia’s premier EdTech startup.

  • Founder and CEO at Bastion7, a boutique consultancy; exited to CoLearn

  • Director of Engineering at Deserve: Conceptualized, built, and delivered work contributing to fundraising and v1 product launches. Built the team from a group of 3 individual contributors to a 20-member fully functional org.

  • Principal Engineer: From the first engineer to acquisition. Built, architected, and scaled a continually growing system.

  • Full profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pagnis

No fluff, just stuff. I keep your inbox happy.

My areas of focus:

  • Engineering Ops, Software Delivery ✅
    Build, lead, and manage engineering teams and practices. Get to market faster, iterate more. Create a sustainable culture of shipping a lot and moving fast. Improve people around me, build people up. Outside of work, I have been running and managing the Bangalore Ruby and Papers We Love communities for 10+ years and have routinely mentored & helped people get better at their craft.

  • Talent Magnet, Hiring and Interviewing ✅
    Set up and build a hiring process that delivers. All hiring problems are software delivery problems in disguise. A job post I wrote in 2019 received 300+ applications and a lot of praise: https://hasjob.co/deserve.com/10i93

  • Systems and Architecture ✅
    Build systems from scratch, improve existing systems, "continuous maintenance," architect new systems, build proofs-of-concept / MVPs, refactor, and re-architect legacy systems.

  • Data-Intensive Applications ✅
    Schema design, data integrity, using and improving usages of relational databases. PostgreSQL, in particular. I conduct a workshop for intermediate and advanced engineers who use PostgreSQL, MySQL, or other RDBMS. https://postgres-workshop.com/

See you around! 🙌🏼

Subscribe to Swanand Pagnis

👋🏼 Essays, guides, playbooks, and talks. You will find software engineering, SQL, coffee, and a slice of life here. All through a geek's lens 🔎.

People

Engineering Leader. CTO at CoLearn, the premier Indonesian EdTech startup.