Varun Pandey trained as a mining engineer before building a citizen journalism platform and scaling FieldAssist's engineering team from a handful to 100+. He led a full microservices overhaul mid-pandemic and went all-in on AI and open source early. He shares what actually works when scaling teams fast and how unconventional backgrounds shape better technical leaders.
What we covered
- CTO journey
- team scaling
- microservices
- AI adoption
What I took away
- Scaling engineering 10x is a people and process problem before it's a technology one
- Microservices overhauls succeed when driven by real coupling pain, not architecture fashion
- Betting on AI early requires giving engineers time to experiment without a productivity tax
- Unconventional backgrounds train leaders to solve problems others don't see