Arvind
Ram Singh Kishore

Experience

8 years building and scaling products, across founder, founding engineer, and engineering leadership roles:

• Mercor Principal Engineer

  2026 - Present

  Leading the Talent Experience Platform team at the fastest-growing company in history — $1M to $2B ARR in 24 months, $10B valuation.

  • Lead the Talent Experience Platform: the surface through which a 300,000+ expert network is matched, onboarded, evaluated, and paid
  • Own systems supporting $2M+ in daily contractor payouts across 30,000+ weekly active experts
  • Build enterprise agent workflows for the AI labs and Fortune-scale customers Mercor serves, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta
  • Drive architecture decisions for a platform scaling through a revenue ramp with no precedent in software
  • Partner directly with founders and product leadership on roadmap and technical strategy

• Vapi Founding Lead Product Engineer

  March 2025 - 2026

  Joined at Series A and helped scale Vapi to a $500M+ valuation, 1B+ calls, and 1M+ developers as voice AI went mainstream.

  • Owned the product surface through 10x enterprise revenue growth and a $130M to $500M+ valuation run
  • Led end-to-end design and development of Vapi's real-time dashboard using React, TypeScript, Zustand, and Tailwind CSS
  • Built Vapi Workflows, the orchestration builder for multi-step voice agents, with per-call overrides, bulk editing, and live debugging
  • Led architecture and implementation of the Evaluations (Evals) engine for testing agent behavior before production
  • Shipped live transcript visualization with animated node traversal, making multi-step agent runs debuggable
  • Rebuilt logging and observability with component-level tracing across STT/LLM/TTS pipelines
  • Contributed to core voice pipeline reliability: advanced voice activity detection, adaptive endpointing, and streaming speech-recognition filters that cut false interruptions
  • Redesigned dashboard architecture for reliability and performance, reducing page load times by 30%
  • Implemented flexible data exports via webhooks and S3, improving production monitoring and incident resolution
  • Platform served customers including Amazon Ring, Intuit, New York Life, and ServiceTitan

• AsynchRetro Founder

  2020 - 2024

  Founded and ran an opinionated async retrospective tool for distributed agile teams. Built and operated solo alongside full-time engineering roles; sunset in 2024.

  • Designed an opinionated 4-step retrospective flow — comments, grouping, voting, discussion — that ran fully asynchronously across time zones
  • Built the complete SaaS: authentication, team and organization management, granular board permissions, and guest access
  • Shipped Stripe subscription billing end-to-end with free trials, annual plans, coupon codes, and win-back offers
  • Implemented real-time multi-user collaboration on Firebase with anonymity controls, vote limits, and per-team board configuration
  • Built on the MERN stack over Google Cloud Platform, shipped and operated as a single engineer

• CapConnect+ Inc Director of Engineering

  May 2024 - March 2025

  Led engineering for a digital marketplace serving fixed income primary markets.

  • Built a digital marketplace reducing corporate paper issuance time by 30%
  • Increased platform adoption by 50% within a year through UX improvements
  • Improved operational transparency and efficiency for issuers, dealers, and investors
  • Contributed to 25% year-over-year growth in platform revenue

• Suno Inc Engineering Manager

  October 2023 - May 2024

  Led development of an AI-driven audiology software platform for healthcare providers.

  • Developed an AI-driven platform streamlining patient management for audiologists
  • Spearheaded integration of real-time analytics and generative AI features
  • Achieved 30% increase in patient engagement through intelligent automation
  • Reduced administrative tasks by 25% for healthcare providers

• HavenTech Team Lead, Senior Software Engineer

  October 2021 - October 2023

  Led the design system team building accessible experiences for over a million users.

  • Led a high-performing team building the Haven Design System (HDS) in React and TypeScript
  • Implemented a scalable micro-frontend architecture in Storybook
  • Componentized HTML elements to meet AA accessibility standards and RFC compliance
  • Transitioned the JavaScript codebase to a scalable TypeScript platform
  • Improved accessibility and performance metrics via Google Lighthouse integration
  • Started and led internal developer communities: FrontEnd Learning Talks and Performance Thursdays

• Vistaprint Senior Software Engineer

  November 2018 - October 2021

  Built tools and services helping small businesses expand their online presence.

  • Migrated over 2 million users from the legacy site builder to the flagship website builder, and led the eventual sunset of the legacy platform
  • Designed database verification and data model mapping scripts to migrate without customer-facing disruption
  • Built revamped dashboards for domain management, email hosting, and customer statistics using Gatsby and GraphQL
  • Implemented localized URL routing across 26 languages and 22 locales

Open Source & Projects

Author of extract-design-system , an AI agent skill with 126K+ installs across Claude, Cursor and Codex that reverse-engineers design tokens from any public website.

I ship agents in the open on GitHub — including ycagent.ai (deep-research agent over the Y Combinator ecosystem), deep-research-agents (background agents with pgvector semantic search), computer-use-agent (multimodal agent driving a live Linux VM), and slack-agent (durable stateful agent infrastructure).

Hackathon judge at the Y Combinator AI Agent Hackathon (2025). I write about production AI engineering at blog.arvindrk.com .