Sahil Dawka

Montréal, Canada | +1 250 686 6896 | [email protected]

Technical Leader maximising happiness and efficiency through purpose

With a background in nanotech (BTech) electrical and computer engineering (MEng), I've done research, written for a tech magazine, built AI-powered educational technology product, and led teams towards the same. I'm most proud of a system that served 3M+ students and delivered $1M+ in operational savings.

Professional Experience

Software Development Manager at Paper

September 2021 — October 2024

  • Helped various individuals grow in happy and high-performing teams
  • Contributed to SDLC and engineering standards, hiring and incident pipelines and training
  • Implemented many feature experiments, iterating most to success (measurable impact)
  • Managed chaos through multiple restructurings without losing major velocity or morale

Tiger Team Manager at Paper

May 2023 — April 2024

  • Started 5 projects from scratch and shipped 3 of them - no bureaucracy, just solving problems fast and communicating well:
    • Human-in-the-loop AI system that saved $1M+ annually
    • LLM observability and stat-based prompt engineering
    • An AI tutor chrome extension

Senior Backend Developer at Paper

February 2021 — September 2021

  • Optimized and refactored code and queries for performance and resilience, as we scaled from thousands to millions of users, transitioning away from our monolithic architecture
  • Built a lot of features, for some months as the only backend developer supporting 5 frontend contributors
  • Started onboarding and mentoring new hires, and setting conventions as a team (around documentation, testing, etc)

Back End Developer at Paper

January 2020 — February 2021

  • Focused on learning about system design, architecture and APIs
  • Fell in love with EXPLAIN, tied test coverage to my inner peace
  • Played around with cloud and serverless for small new services (image compression, manual data ingestion, pdf conversion, etc)

Full-stack Developer at Paper, Montreal

January 2019 — January 2020

  • Somewhere between shipping my first line of production code to my first end-to-end feature, I learnt about product building and its associated processes in tech.

Research And Development Intern at TandemLaunch Inc., Montreal

August 2021 — November 2021

  • Hunted through academic papers for unapplied scientific knowledge with commercial potential, and communicated them to entrepreneurs in residence.

Education

Master of Engineering, University of Victoria

2017 — 2019

Electrical and Computer Engineering

  • Courses: Statistics, Information Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, FPGAs, Photovoltaics, Nanotechnology
  • Author on three published papers

B.Tech - Nanotechnology, Amity University

2011 — 2015

Skills

Technical

  • Language agnostic, can RTFM
  • Can tinker when no/bad docs
  • Written prod code in PHP, Python, JS, Go
  • Frameworks at work: Laravel, Vue, FastAPI, Express

Product

  • Domain understanding
  • Products as Programs
  • System design and architecture
  • User focused evaluation
  • Slicing and iteration

Management

  • Leading people, processes and projects by example
  • Bias for progress over perfection, impact over intention
  • Making work fun and innovating through Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose

Languages

English: Native

Hindi: Good

French: A2

Spanish: A2