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Sid Verma

Senior Full-Stack Engineer

10+ years building products end to end: UX, architecture, code, and infrastructure.
Seasoned in technical ownership, from roadmap to production.

Built a social feed for 50M+ users, infrastructure platforms at a high-frequency trading firm, and core parts of the open-source Open edX platform. Since 2024, fractional CTO for startups and non-profits: turning business goals into technical roadmaps, leading small teams, and running production systems. Fully remote since 2020.

Experience

Fractional CTO & Independent Consultant (2024 – Present)

Selected engagements with startups, non-profits and arts organizations, usually as the senior technical person, leading teams of up to five.
  • Tapmath: Fractional CTO. Inherited AI-built MVPs and turned them into production-ready products: cleaned up the code, shipped new features on accelerated timelines, and set up AI agents with guardrails to automate engineering and operations work.
  • March: Fractional CTO. Planned and delivered technical roadmaps targeting the company's pain points. Stabilized the Odoo ERP behind accounting and operations, clearing tech debt and cutting the team's support load.
  • shepherd.com: Designed and built an ingestion pipeline that collects, cleans and stores large volumes of data at low infrastructure cost.
  • India Foundation for the Arts: Built map modules and interactive websites for exploring archival wikis.
  • ERA India: Built low-tech, collaborative tools for farmers to record and share crop data.
  • Serendipity Arts Festival: Led the technical build for immersive theatre and interactive installations, combining embedded hardware with real-time generative visuals.
  • HH Art Spaces: Built the website and livestreaming infrastructure for Open 24/7 (gentlyopen.com), an artist’s 29-day, round-the-clock livestream.
  • Also mentored makers at Maker's Asylum and wrote science fiction about AI and society for Digital Futures Lab.
Stack: Python (Django, Flask), JavaScript (Node.js, React, Astro), Odoo, Ansible · C++ (embedded), GLSL, TouchDesigner

Senior Full-Stack Engineer ❯ OpenCraft (2020 – 21, returned 2023 – 24)

Fully remote consultancy providing hosting, custom development and upstream contributions for Open edX, the open-source platform behind edX.
  • Architected and built core Open edX components, including plugins and deployment orchestration, for clients ranging from small institutions to large global deployments.
  • Upstreamed search indexing for the new content libraries backend into edx-platform (Blockstore → Elasticsearch). PR #24530
  • Ran client infrastructure across AWS, GCP, OpenStack and bare metal with Terraform, Ansible and Kubernetes, and built internal tools for provisioning, deploying and monitoring it.
  • Led hiring for the team (screening, interviews, onboarding) and mentored new developers across time zones.
  • Built sprint-planning and tracking tools that made the team's delivery more predictable.
Stack: Python (Django, Flask), React, Go, Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, OpenStack, AWS, GCP

Full-Stack Engineer (Contract) ❯ Shortform, Solar Accounts, McLaren College (2020 – 22)

  • Built REST APIs in Python and Node.js and turned design mockups into production Vue.js apps.
  • Added end-to-end encryption for financial data in Solar Accounts' accounting product.
  • Improved API availability and response times, and cut cloud infrastructure costs.
  • McLaren College: Designed and taught courses in programming, web development, JavaScript and Dart; built tools for running concurrent online classrooms and a backend for grading and feedback.
Stack: JavaScript (Node.js, Vue.js), Python (Django), Dart, Ansible, AWS

Full-Stack Engineer ❯ Tower Research Capital (2017 – 19)

Internal platform team at a global high-frequency trading firm, building tools to provision, monitor and debug servers, applications and networks for trading and operations teams worldwide.
  • Designed and built an internal provisioning platform (an in-house EC2) for physical and virtual servers.
  • Built the firm-wide logging, monitoring and alerting platform, with fine-grained access control across teams.
  • Cut response times on core platform APIs by 2–10x.
  • Redesigned the central automation framework so teams could automate both operations and approval workflows, removing redundant sign-offs and wait times.
  • Led development of tools that visualize the firm's physical and logical infrastructure.
Stack: Go, Python (Django), Vue.js, React, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Terraform

Full-Stack Engineer ❯ Hello English (CultureAlley) (2015 – 17)

  • Designed and built the in-app social feed for 50M+ users, keeping it fast on a small infrastructure budget.
  • Built a chatbot platform and a templating language that course authors used to write interactive lessons.
  • Built speech recognition and pronunciation grading for Indian-accented English, running both on servers and on-device in browsers and mobile apps.
  • Introduced CI/CD with automated tests, deploys and rollbacks across all apps and services.
  • Turned the main web app into an offline Electron app and a PWA from a single codebase.
Stack: Python (Flask), JavaScript (Node.js), Electron, AWS, Android, Java, C++

Engineering Intern ❯ smallcase (Tickertape) (2015 – 16)

  • Sole developer of the first Stock Screener (UI, backend and data pipelines), now part of Tickertape, which has 3M+ monthly active users.
  • Wrote internal libraries for integrating vendors' REST and SOAP APIs.
Stack: Node.js, AngularJS

Skills

Education

B.Tech, Computer Science ❯ Jaypee University of Engineering and Technology (2012 – 16)