Santhosh Narayanan
Engineering Lead
Engineering Lead responsible for systems, decisions, and the people working on them.
A decade of building, changing, and understanding software systems.
Email santhoshsathish94@gmail.com Phone +91-741383614 LinkedIn /in/santhosh-narayanan-link GitHub /santhoshsathish94 Website santhoshsathish94.github.io/professional-profile Location Chennai, India · open to relocation
Profile
A decade of working on software systems, from building them from the ground up to changing systems that already had to keep working.
As an Engineering Lead, the work spans the system and the people around it: technical direction, difficult decisions, architecture and code reviews, mentoring, and delivery.
AI is now part of that work. It can increase capability, but responsibility stays with the engineer and the team. The system still has to show what happened.
Leadership & Scope
- Lead five engineering teams across product and platform work.
- Set technical direction across architecture, delivery, engineering quality, and difficult technical decisions.
- Work with engineers, product, QA, DevOps, architects, leadership, and business stakeholders to turn problems into decisions teams can execute.
- Mentor engineers and build team capability so knowledge and decisions do not depend on one person.
- Coordinate work across teams and with US-based stakeholders while working from India.
- Stay hands-on with architecture, systems, performance work, and AI-assisted engineering.
Systems I Have Built
CMS — Xome.com
- Built the CMS from the ground up for the xome.com redesign.
- Designed reusable content sections with permitted nesting, layout variants, and required fields enforced by the model.
- Supports 50 published pages across 8 page types, while keeping experience concerns separate from shared platform capabilities.
Global WeChat Platform
- Built and evolved a global handler for WeChat serving a business-critical integration platform.
- Mapped the existing system and moved it toward scalable, extensible handling.
Payroll Platform
- Built a payroll system around real operational workflows.
- Worked directly with clients and business stakeholders from requirements through demonstrations and rollout.
Professional Experience
Xome Jan 2020 – Present • US real estate & mortgage technology
Engineering Lead (Jan 2020 – Present)
Leadership
Lead five engineering teams across product and platform work. Set technical direction, review architecture and code, mentor engineers, and coordinate delivery across engineering and partner functions.
Technical Work
Stay hands-on with architecture, systems, performance work, and difficult technical decisions. Help teams understand the system well enough to make decisions that hold up in production.
AI-Assisted Engineering
Introduced AI through internal sessions, workshops, read-only access to internal systems, and automated deployment testing connected to non-production environments and pipeline triggers.
Architecture & Technical Direction
Designed the content architecture behind the xome.com redesign. Challenged a proposed single generic content endpoint because separate contracts would remain independently testable and contain the impact of future changes. The team chose separate per-resource endpoints.
Chatly Software Engineer • Nov 2018 – Jan 2020
Global WeChat Platform
Built and evolved a global WeChat handler as part of a business-critical integration platform.
UB Technology Innovations Software Engineer • Jun 2016 – Oct 2018
Payroll Platform
Built a payroll system around real operational workflows.
Client-Facing Delivery
Worked directly with clients and business stakeholders through requirements, demonstrations, and rollout.
AI Engineering & Systems
AI-Assisted Engineering
AI orchestration • Human-AI collaboration • Evidence-based validation • AI adoption and enablement
Architecture
Software Architecture • Distributed Systems • Platform Architecture • API Architecture • Integration Architecture • Systems Thinking
Engineering & Cloud
.NET • C# • React • Next.js • TypeScript • GraphQL • REST APIs • SQL Server • Azure • Kubernetes • Docker • Azure DevOps • Contentful • Elasticsearch
Primary languages C# and TypeScript; comfortable reading and working in Python.
Practice & Communication
Performance Engineering • Load Testing • Technical Writing • Engineer Training • Stakeholder Communication • Translating Trade-offs into Business Terms
Open Engineering Work
Clover — AI Engineering Framework Open-source project • 2026 – Present
santhoshsathish94.github.io/ai-orchestration-framework
- Built and documented Clover from lessons learned using AI across software engineering, production investigation, and delivery.
- Defines Context → Direction → Execution → Outcome → Growth as a cycle connecting system reality, human accountability, AI capability, evidence, and learning.
- Designed to sit on top of existing systems and workflows. No new runtime, toolchain, or mandatory human process is required.
- Published the framework with a public website, quickstart, working artifacts, reference implementations, case studies, and explicit limits on what has and has not been validated.
Engineering Principles
Understand before fixing. Know what is wrong before deciding what to change.
Focus over parallelism. More work at the same time does not necessarily mean more progress.
Prove outcomes, not activity. Completing the work is not the same as achieving the outcome.
Design for adoption. A capability that remains with one person does not change how the team works.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Computer Science & Engineering
Anna University, Chennai