Rahul Agrawal Senior Software Engineer AI Product Engineer • Frontend Architect India · +91-9691078419 · meet4g@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/ice-rahul · ice-rahul.github.io · cssbattle.dev/player/rahul_agrawal --- ## Summary Senior engineer with 9+ years of experience turning ambiguous product ideas into software that real users depend on. Most recently built the interaction layer between users, AI, and a no-code platform at Knack — a chat-based builder that generates and validates live applications through natural language — and designed a greenfield appointment scheduling system from workflow discussions through production. Comfortable working without a fully specified problem: partners with product early, prototypes fast, and owns a feature through backend collaboration, edge cases, and what happens after it ships. Frontend by background, with hands-on experience building the product-facing side of AI features — streaming interfaces, MCP tooling, and the debugging systems needed to trust what an AI-driven feature is doing. --- ## Selected Impact - **Built the interaction layer for an AI-powered no-code builder** — the chat experience, streaming responses, and MCP tools that let the AI safely create and validate application views, plus the debugging tooling to see what it was actually doing. - **Designed and built a scheduling system from scratch** — worked with Product to define the workflow, then owned it through builder configuration, metadata generation, schema changes, and timezone-aware booking logic for both single- and multi-timezone businesses. - **Cut a core API's response time from 14 seconds to under 400 milliseconds** by finding and fixing a MongoDB data-access anti-pattern that had been slowing the platform down. - **Closed a scheduling gap customers had been asking about for years** by shipping a Year View for the calendar system. --- ## Core Expertise Product-Facing AI Engineering · Frontend Architecture · Greenfield Ownership · Rapid Prototyping · Developer Tooling · Cross-Functional Collaboration with Product · Performance & Scalability --- ## Technical Skills - **Languages** — TypeScript, JavaScript (ES6+), HTML5, CSS3 - **Frontend** — React.js, Next.js, Redux, React Query - **Backend** — Node.js, Express.js, REST APIs - **Databases** — MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL - **AI Tooling** — MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool development, streaming response architecture, Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, LM Studio, Ollama, prompt engineering - **Developer Tools** — Git, CI/CD, Jest, Lighthouse, performance profiling --- ## Professional Experience ### Senior Software Engineer — Knack *Dec 2024 – Present* Knack is a no-code application platform. I work across its builder, scheduling, and AI systems — usually starting from a product conversation rather than a fully written spec. **AI Builder — the interaction layer between users, AI, and the platform** The backend orchestration and MCP server already existed when I joined this effort; my ownership was everything the user actually experiences and everything an engineer needs to trust it. - Built the full chat experience, including streaming AI responses in real time rather than waiting on complete replies. - Built the MCP tools the AI uses to safely create and validate application views — the layer that keeps AI-generated changes within what the platform can actually support. - Separated streamed text responses from tool-call responses so tool execution could be visualized and debugged independently, instead of being a black box. - Synchronized the builder with the live application preview using `postMessage`, so users never watched a half-generated application flash into view mid-stream — the difference between a feature that feels reliable and one that looks broken. - This shipped as the primary way users configure applications through natural language, not a chat widget bolted onto the side of the product. **Appointment Booking — greenfield, from workflow to production** Product had validated the need for scheduling but hadn't defined how it should work across Knack's range of businesses. I worked with Product to shape the workflow before writing implementation code, and treated it as a product decision, not a feature spec: the same booking system had to make sense for a single-provider service and a multi-location business with its own scheduling logic. - Designed the enablement workflow and the builder configuration experience — how a business actually turns booking on and sets it up for how they operate. - Defined the metadata generation and schema evolution needed to represent resource-based availability, so the same underlying model could flex across business types Knack hadn't originally been built around. - Built timezone-aware scheduling that holds up for both single-timezone and multi-timezone businesses — one of the places where "it works" and "it works correctly for the customer" are different bars. - Collaborated with backend engineering where platform-level changes were required, and carried the feature through to live application integration. **Other platform work** - Extended the Calendar platform to support recurring events, advanced scheduling, and export — including a Year View that closed a long-standing customer request. - Built an internal "Test as User" capability that let developers and support reproduce customer scenarios directly, cutting the time it took to investigate reported issues. - Validated shipped work by monitoring customer feedback in Slack channels post-release, and demoed new capabilities in internal sprint reviews to keep Product and engineering aligned on what was actually landing. ### Senior Software Engineer — Memora Health *Nov 2022 – Dec 2024* Memora builds workflow software for healthcare care teams. - Investigated a core API that had degraded to ~14 seconds per request, traced it to a MongoDB data-access anti-pattern, redesigned the query strategy, and got response times under 400 milliseconds. Documented the approach so the pattern wouldn't recur elsewhere in the codebase. - Contributed patterns and implementation guidance to an in-flight migration from Redux to React Query, helping standardize how the team handled server state. - Built patient-facing and internal healthcare workflows, including notification systems, re-enrollment flows, and action item management. - Reviewed code and mentored engineers on the frontend team. ### Senior Frontend Developer — Proximity Works (Disney+ Hotstar) *Jul 2021 – Nov 2022* Contracted through Proximity Works onto Disney+ Hotstar's frontend team, building consumer-facing interfaces at streaming scale. - Built and optimized high-performance web interfaces for a global OTT platform, with close attention to pixel-level implementation and CSS performance. - Improved page load times by 40% and contributed to a 20% increase in user engagement through frontend performance work. - Worked inside an established, high-traffic production codebase where a small regression could reach millions of users — a different discipline than greenfield work, and one that sharpened how carefully I ship changes. ### Technical Lead — IceInfotech *Mar 2018 – Jul 2021* Acted as technical lead for a team of five engineers building SaaS products, mobile applications, and web platforms for startups and SMBs — my first experience owning technical direction rather than just implementation. - Set technical direction and made architecture decisions across concurrent client projects, working directly with clients to understand what they actually needed before committing the team to an approach. - Ran code reviews and mentored the team through delivery. - Delivered end-to-end full-stack solutions, from architecture through shipped product. ### Software Developer — KPIT *Feb 2016 – Mar 2018* - Built tooling to convert legacy C code into model-based systems for automotive software used by Cummins India Limited. - Learned engineering fundamentals in a domain with a low tolerance for error — an environment that shaped how I think about correctness and testing. --- ## Achievements - **CSSBattle:** Ranked in the global Top 100, reflecting close attention to CSS and pixel-level frontend craft. - **Microsoft Certified Professional.** - **Fast Fingers:** Built a full-stack typing game (React.js, Node.js, Express.js, MySQL) with JWT authentication and dynamic difficulty progression — a side project built for the sake of building it. --- ## Education **MBA, IT Project Management** Welingkar Institute of Management 2018 – 2020 **B.E., Mechatronics** Chhattisgarh Swami Vivekanand Technical University 2011 – 2015