Ershad Kunnakkadan

I build and operate backend systems, web and mobile apps, infrastructure, and AI-native products.

Fourteen years in, I've gone from hands-on engineer to leading Gumroad as its CEO, and then back to building full time, which is the part I've always liked most.

Résumé (PDF) GitHub LinkedIn [email protected]

Work

2020-present

Gumroad

Senior Engineer → Staff Engineer → CEO → Staff Engineer

Own infrastructure, security and performance for a platform with $100M+ in annual GMV and 7B+ requests a month. Led the work to open-source the codebase, moved analytics from MongoDB to DynamoDB, and rolled out fraud defenses and 2FA for every user. Served as CEO, accountable for strategy, product, operations and company performance, then chose to return to hands-on engineering to build AI-native products and agent-driven systems.

2015-2020

BigBinary

Senior Software Engineer

Full-stack consulting engineer across a range of client products, mostly Ruby on Rails. Embedded with Gumroad as infrastructure lead from 2017, moving production to Docker and Nomad with zero-downtime deploys.

2012-2015

Bang the Table

Software Engineer → Software Architect

Led one of the engineering teams building EngagementHQ, the flagship product, and owned DevOps, scalability and security alongside it.

What I do

Infrastructure & DevOps

AWS · Terraform · Packer · Nomad · Consul · Docker · GitHub Actions · Cloudflare · Heroku · Ansible · Chef

Security

Application security · vulnerability research · fraud prevention · secrets management · SSO and access control · Vault · Okta

Backend & product

Ruby on Rails · Ruby · Python · Go · Elixir / Phoenix · PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · DynamoDB · Redis · Elasticsearch

Frontend & AI-native systems

TypeScript · React · Next.js · Claude Code · Anthropic and OpenAI APIs · RAG · LLM-backed workflows, agents and internal tooling

Recognition

  • O-1A visa, United States. Recognised by the U.S. government as an individual with extraordinary ability.
  • GitHub Security Bounty. Reported a security vulnerability in GitHub Gist. Researcher page.
  • Prezi bug bounty. Reported a vulnerability that exposed presentation titles held in the database.
  • Google Summer of Code, 2013 & 2014. Mentored and assessed students at Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, and built the Grandham bibliography platform and APIs.
  • Wikimedia DevCamp, 2012. Won “Most Innovative Project” at IIM Bangalore.

Open source

  • Gumroad. Led the work to open-source the codebase, and continue to work on its infrastructure, security and performance.
  • Gumboard. Created this open-source team to-do board and built its first version solo.
  • GitLab. Built user mention notifications in issue descriptions and comments.
  • Wikimedia. Fixed issues in the Universal Language Selector.
  • Swathanthra Malayalam Computing. Developed and translated software for the Malayalam-speaking community.

Elsewhere