Manthan Surkar

I am a Lead Engineer (Backend, Applied AI & Infra) from Maharashtra, India. I have a passion for space science and yoga, and I'm interested in early-stage startups (or creating them).

I graduated from IIIT-Allahabad in 2022 with a B.Tech in Information Technology. I received a 🥇 gold medal for my final year performance and a 🥈 silver medal for overall performance.

On the technical side, I specialize in backend engineering, AI pipelines, and infrastructure. I'm currently at Seezo.io where I lead AI research, backend, and infra from scratch. I've won 10+ hackathons including ETHIndia and Smart India Hackathon.

Work

Lead & Founding Engineer @ Seezo.io

Lead AI research, backend, and infrastructure from scratch. Built and optimized AI pipelines including lightweight AI agents, RAG, evals, and advanced search using Agno and LangChain. Managed infra across AWS and Azure with Terraform. Scaled the engineering team from 1 to 7+.

Software Engineer @ BharatX

Reduced credit risk analysis costs by over 75% through improved analytics and monitoring. Enhanced backend observability with Prometheus and Grafana across 5+ microservices. Built a unified messaging layer for WhatsApp and SMS.

Senior Software Engineer @ Razorpay

Increased Auto-KYC coverage from 10% to over 75% by building and deploying CNN models for captcha solving and automating verification workflows. Contributed to the Account Service — decomposing a monolith into a high-performance service handling 10K+ RPS. Received top 1% employee rating across all review cycles.

Opensource

Check out my GitHub: thesmallstar

I love open-source ❤️ and am a contributor and committer for Apache Fineract via GSoC 2020, with 100+ PRs merged. I also mentored for the project in 2021 and 2022.

I maintain Slackify Markdown, a Python package with 2.5M+ downloads. Other contributions include LangChain, OpenEMR, and phpMyAdmin.

This website is also open source! You can find the code at github.com/thesmallstar/surkar.in.

Launches

Bhava.app — AI diagramming tool; 5th Product of the Day on Product Hunt. 2500+ users, 30+ paying customers.
Patra.app — AI tool to manage Jira from Slack; 17th Product of the Day on Product Hunt.
Abha.page — Color palette generator with live demo; 18th Product of the Day on Product Hunt.
Prana — Chrome extension to track remaining time; 14th Product of the Day on Product Hunt.
Hostetic — Web hosting platform built in college; scaled to 1000+ users, later acquired. Story.

Blog

Visit my blog at link where I am mainly writing about AI/LLMs.

I used to blog at truetricks.com (2013 school days). I am moving to a new blog at blog.surkar.in and archiving the old one as a memory :D

Let's Connect!

Twitter Twitter

Calendly

Email Email