War stories of scaling to millions and billions.
A story about Spark, scheduling, and a cloud bill that refused to make sense. Chapter 1: A Fresh Start on Kubernetes Every migration story starts with optimism, and ours was no different. We had just moved our Spark workloads from EMR to Kubernetes (EKS). On paper, it was…
How large language models help shoppers find what they mean, not just what they type. Author: Aarav Nigam Introduction Every search box eventually hits a wall where traditional search stops being useful. Searching tide powder 100g on Instamart works seamlessly. Exact keywords…
The JioHotstar platform receives in excess of 40TB data every day. At 2.1 million messages per second. At this scale, every superflous byte is costly, like real money costly. In this blog, we cover strategies that helped us optimise our ingest workflow which ultimately saved…
1. Introduction In the on-demand food delivery ecosystem, an app’s Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) is the foundation of customer trust. Promise 25 minutes for a 40-minute delivery, and you leave a customer frustrated. Show 50 minutes for a 30-minute delivery, and that customer…
Synchronizing Video, Audio, Whiteboard Events, and Distributed Backends at Scale What happens when thousands of students join a live classroom, rewind a lecture by 30 seconds, and still expect the teacher’s whiteboard drawings, voice, and video to remain perfectly…
A field guide to the duplicate events, stale state, rebalances, and deployment traps that quietly distort real-time decisions — told through one decision that should have fired and didn’t. Note: This piece assumes working familiarity with Kafka and event-streaming fundamentals —…
Introduction/TL;DR At JioHotstar, we have been thinking a lot about how to give developers a better AI-assisted engineering experience. Once coding agents started becoming useful for day-to-day work, the next natural question was: how do we help those agents understand our…
The OS decides whether your app may open a URL — before any of your code runs. We swapped the SDK underneath that, without republishing the links we already owned.A partner taps a link in an SMS, a push, a share sheet — and lands on the exact screen they needed. We changed the…
It’s 3:00 AM. The glare of a monitor cuts through a pitch-black room as a critical alert pierces your sleep. Seconds later, you’re locked in a familiar, exhausting ritual: eight browser tabs open, bouncing frantically from Grafana metrics to Loki log streams, then over to Jira…
Preface One evening Postgres ran a routine ANALYZE on one of our tables. Within minutes, one of our payment products was degraded. Nothing had been deployed. No migration, no config change, and traffic was normal. Yet the database writer was saturated, latency on the transaction…
How Freshworks evolved its Karpenter bootstrap architecture across 400+ EKS clusters — and what it’s paying off now. by Ebin Gladson At Freshworks, our applications run on AWS EKS. A while back, we moved from Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter, and the switch paid off in several…
The model is only one part of the inference pipeline. At scale, the work happening around it, from routing requests to coordinating downstream dependencies, can have a much bigger impact on latency and efficiency. We addressed this by separating model execution from request…
At PhonePe, our strategy for AI in HR was never about deploying a single, generic solution. Instead, we set out to build a fit for purpose ecosystem prioritizing speed, flexibility, and accuracy embedded directly into daily workflows. AI Readiness began before AI. We have been…
Introduction Android’s native RecyclerView is exceptionally efficient at handling large datasets through item recycling, but it lacks native support for spatial interactions like pinch-to-zoom and canvas-level panning. For complex layouts—such as interactive retail grids or…
What are the Meesho Mantras, why do they exist, and how do they actually shape decisions? The complete explanation - one mantra at a time. Ask anyone who has worked at a fast-growing company the same question, and you'll get some version of the same answer: the hardest part was…
Coauthored by Satyajeet Coordinating Data Evolution at Enterprise Scale When you operate data platforms on a global enterprise scale, hundreds of engineering teams ship improvements every week, each moving independently to deliver value at the pace of the business demands. This…
Client-side engineering lessons from optimizing billions of image loads every day in Meesho’s Android app. Within the Meesho app, images serve as the product surface itself rather than mere ornamentation. Users judge fabric, finish, colour, fit and detail through pixels, while…
Solving an AAPT2 Auto-Versioning Mystery The discovery APK size is a core performance metric for us. We track it continuously, investigate regressions, and regularly inspect what is actually shipped, not only what exists in source control. That habit led us to an unusual…
Lens lets your team see what is happening inside a running mobile app—from a normal web browser. You Know This Bug, Right? It is Friday afternoon. QA tells you that the profile screen is blank after login. You open the same app, follow the same steps, and everything works. The…
Amey Patil , Shreya Malani· November 2025 Every product you see on a Flipkart search results page is there because a system decided it was relevant to what you typed. But how do we know those decisions are good? Someone — or something — has to look at a query and a product and…
More than 70% of the code my team ships is now AI-generated. Velocity stopped being our constraint a while ago. What replaced it is a question the team asks several times a week, and until this year we had no defensible way to answer it. The question every developer on my team…
The Debugging Dilemma: Why TraceMind? In a complex mobile ecosystem, debugging a single production crash is rarely a straightforward task. Historically, developers at PhonePe faced a fragmented landscape of data points. When a crash alert hit, an engineer would often spend…
Agents now write most of our code, and the panic about what that means for engineers is aimed at exactly the wrong half of the job. A mental model I keep coming back to, what it says about the engineer we are all becoming, and why the engineers with the most to gain are the ones…
Advertising is a key source of revenue in most businesses. It certainly forms a key pillar for JioHotstar. There is so much technology hidden under the surface. In this blog, we will cover some of the complexity that gets unlocked when we render an ad on our content. Every…
Author: Jayshmi A Special thanks to soumyajyoti banerjee , Meghana Negi, Shaik Masihullah, Akash Deep for their contributions throughout this project and Sunil Rathee for his guidance. The counterintuitive story of how 350+ carefully engineered features + a simple MLP matched…
Building Swiggy’s AI onboarding companion for delivery executives, where accuracy alone wasn’t enough and mentorship had to scale.For a new Delivery Executive (DE) joining Swiggy, the experience is often overwhelming, throwing a world of SOPs, incentive structures, zone…
Engineering across all Swiggy Apps has always had a simple problem with a very large surface area: we ship fast, but every release, every production signal, and every operational review touches too many systems. For a single release manager or on-call engineer, the day could…
India is undergoing a massive digital transformation, and at the heart of this revolution is PhonePe, enabling seamless payments and financial services for over 700 million registered users across Bharat. When you build at this kind of population scale, handling millions of…
TrustMeshDownload to access the paperTRUST.pdf1 MBdownload-circle Every day, millions of Cash-on-Delivery orders flow through Meesho. The vast majority are legitimate: a first-time buyer in Patna ordering a kurta, a reseller in Surat stocking up on inventory. But tucked inside…
At PhonePe, we process a staggering 400 million transactions a day—amounting to over 10 billion monthly, operating at a scale that places it among the largest payment platforms globally. Managing such scale would typically require a massive customer support infrastructure for…
🎭 The Mystery Begins Picture this: You’re a responsible Android developer. You’ve done everything right. You’ve replaced those bulky PNGs with lighter, elegant, scalable SVGs. You’ve patted yourself on the back. You’ve probably even tweeted about it. Then one day, you open the…
At Swiggy, we use Protocol Buffers everywhere. Nearly every message exchanged between our backend services and our mobile apps is a protobuf. On Android, the default and most widely adopted way to work with those schemas was protobuf-java, Google’s official Java runtime, with…
Scaling Android CI: From 44 → 10 minutes — A Deep Dive into Build Time Optimization and Best Practices Android monorepos get expensive and slow as they scale. We re-architected CI/CD caching, trimmed the Gradle graph, tuned the JVM, modernized the toolchain, and finally moved to…
At Meesho, we’ve always believed that building a great company starts with building a great team — not just in terms of skills, but in the way people think, solve problems, and grow. One of the most powerful ideas that’s shaped how we hire, grow, and retain our people is Talent…
You did something wrong as a kid. You knew you weren’t supposed to. And somewhere in the house, your mom just found out. Your heart is going faster than it ever has. You’re calculating exit routes. And then you hear it: the slap of a chappal being picked up. You’ve accepted your…
Over the past couple of years, PhonePe’s journey toward operationalizing AI began with a search for external platforms capable of automating complex, cognitive business processes. However, as we tested various AI tools for our engineering and operational requirements, we…
by Joshua Platt and Jason Reaves [TLP:CLEAR] Earlier this year, Google Threat Intelligence[1] reported threat actors are increasingly deploying novel, AI-enabled malware in active operations[2]. While investigating a recent OSINT article[3] on malware campaign activity reported…
Introduction Generative AI offers a path to content creation at speeds and scales that traditional pipelines cannot match. One high-value use case: making existing IP characters-sports presenters, show hosts, brand ambassadors -deliver new scripts in their own likeness, without…
Turning Scattered Data Into Queryable Segments at Scale: How Razorpay Built Its Customer Data Platform A consent-native CDP that serves audience segments across 500M+ user profiles in under 30ms, with PII isolated to the source systems. The Problem We Were Solving A customer…
A college student in Bangalore browsing on 5G with an iPhone 15. A homemaker in Siwan, Bihar, scrolling through sarees on a Redmi 9A with 2GB of RAM over patchy 3G. A first-time buyer in Tinsukia, Assam, on a JioPhone Next with a 5.5-inch 720p screen and a signal that drops…
By: Jason Reaves and Joshua Platt In this blog we simply want to highlight a few new additions to what appears to be related to MetaStealer, one is a new wordlist based DGA used by MetaStealer. We also want to highlight that MetaStealer’s proxies or ‘gates’ don’t actually care…
Introduction If you have ever filed a complaint on an e-commerce app — uploaded a photo of a damaged packet, reported a wrong item, or flagged an expired product — you were probably expecting a quick, fair resolution. You were not thinking about what happens on the other side.…
A seller ships the correct product. A buyer claims they didn't receive what they ordered. Both tell their truth. In the vast supply chain, where millions of packages move unseen, lies the issue that Meesho's Trust & Safety team works to address. The honest answer is that no…
Imagine you find the perfect product on Meesho. The price is right. The deal is live. But your salary hits next week. So you close the app and move on. That moment, small, quiet, repeated millions of times every day is the problem we decided to solve. India has no shortage of…
What 18 months of building an internal platform — and driving tenant adoption — have taught me. The common mistakes, and six phases for doing it right. The strange quiet after launch Six months after we built and launched an internal platform, I thought adoption would be easy.…
IWTCIntroduction If you have ever typed “I want to cancel my order” into a support chat, you were probably not looking for a workflow. You were looking for clarity, speed, and some assurance that the platform understood what had gone wrong. At Swiggy, this seemingly simple…
The Problem A Delivery Executive (DE) finishes their day, opens the app, and expects a clear breakdown of what they earned. Instead, they often see a payout that does not fully match their expectations — an incentive missing, a deduction they do not recognise, or a credited…
Every morning, lakhs of Meesho sellers open their payment tab looking for one simple thing: confirmation that the orders they fulfilled have translated into money they can trust. For a seller, a payout is not just a bank transfer. It is a working capital. It is confidence to…