As job markets see a heightened pace of change, tech emerges as one sector where learning can never stop. As technology evolves, engineers are required to gather skills to solve problems that never existed before and build products for brand-new user segments.
At Cashfree Payments, we believe mentorship and ample opportunities to experiment, lead, and take ownership are key to a successful tech career. In our latest interaction with Tech Titans on Life At Cashfree, we speak to Sujith Surendran, our senior director of engineering about how he leads his teams towards innovation and the secret sauce behind his thriving career through countless tech disruptions.
Talking to him, we discovered that an impact mindset is the north star that makes the engineering teams at Cashfree Payments uniquely innovative and passionate about taking on high-level ownership. Here’s Sujith sharing more about his journey, interesting work from his teams, and the tech-first culture we have at Cashfree Payments.
The bulk of your career in tech has been with large-scale multinational companies. What attracted you to Cashfree Payments and the startup environment?
I’ve been in tech for close to 25 years, and for most of that time I focused on international markets. But after a while, I realised I wanted to take on a role where I could interact with the Indian market and build for the businesses and consumers here. Cashfree Payments presented the perfect opportunity to do this. Some of my pivotal experiences for this decision also came from my stint at Yahoo, where I worked with the small businesses team for close to eight years. While that was in e-commerce, it gave me a good sense of what it’s like to deal with customers who count on you to ensure their money comes in. It’s a big responsibility because if that fails, it affects the customer’s entire business. That feeling of responsibility resonated with me. Cashfree Payments offered me the opportunity to combine these three key areas – building for Indian markets, an agile startup environment, and the scope of making an impact. It felt like the right next move.
It’s an interesting time to be in fintech. What are some of the tech trends you see emerging in fintech? Could you also share how we’re leveraging those trends at Cashfree Payments?
If you look at the kind of market we can touch with Cashfree Payments, it extends to anyone who can use a smartphone to exchange money. Scale is a huge consideration in how we approach tech here. Secondly, success rates are crucial in fintech because it ensures money has been safely transferred between customer and merchant accounts. It’s one place where we can create a massive impact. We consider scale, latency, security and the best tech available to give merchants the most refined experience possible.
In some cases, we leverage AI to do this. For example, when a transaction is processed, there are multiple routes through which it can be done. As a user, you may be using UPI or card credentials, but behind the scenes, we have to route through several intermediaries to process the transaction. To ensure high success rates we use AI to identify payment routes facing issues. We proactively switch out routes that look like they may fail in that instance, and AI helps us improve our route logic. We’re baking this into our Flowwise product as well. Risk and fraud prevention is another area where we are leveraging AI , for internal risk as well as for risk solutions which we are providing to our merchants. We also use GenAI hosted within our AWS infrastructure to cut down on response time for customer support use cases.
Fintech is a regulated space as well with a lot of focus on security and compliance. Cashfree Payments also looks at how we can make the entire process more secure for merchants.
Interesting. As the space continues to evolve and we see new products enter the market, how do you ensure your teams balance business goals with innovation and regulations?
Internally we have a well-oiled system where we do high-level quarterly planning that rolls down to all teams. These help us reach our business objectives so that teams can identify where their priorities lie. However there are regulatory changes which may need to be addressed at short notice. There are also bigger bets we take as a team where we build things over a longer period of time.
An example of this is how our risk engineering team built tools to identify fraudulent activity. Earlier, we had a semi-automated and a more manual system to deal with this. Some time back we formed a risk engineering team made up of engineers and data scientists to automate this further. They used AI to determine high risk, and enable a second level of checks. Building this happened in phases, and we do it to meet the larger bets of making our products safer and more compliant.
Eventually we were able to build the RiskShield product that we offer to our merchants so that they can manage their risk.
That’s a great example of proactive innovation. If we had to zoom in a little now, and focus on your personal leadership style, what would you say are your leadership principles? How do you keep your team inspired to innovate?
One of the unique things about Cashfree Payments is that it offers individuals and teams the opportunity to take a great deal of ownership. Along with this we make sure engineers know the impact of what they’re working on. Seeing impact metrics for projects that you’ve put your heart and soul into can be very gratifying. So an impact-orientation is definitely one of the first principles I use.
Another would be being adaptable and nimble. As a startup where compliance is key, we need to be ready if regulations change. There are times when we may have a quarterly plan, but if a new regulation comes into play, it could change 30-40% of our roadmap. Engineers need to be adaptable to deal with that.
Lastly, I also encourage engineers to see things through. If they’ve built something, they need to be curious about how it goes into production and especially about how people are using it. I encourage my teams to keep track of the impact of their work, even if it was done months earlier.
A lot of the engineers in Cashfree Payments are also early-stage professionals who value mentorship. What is your approach to ensuring they get the guidance they need?
Many engineers who join us are looking to interact with experienced folks and learn from them. We have systems to facilitate this where we pair senior engineers with those who are just starting their careers.
Even within teams, we have a lot of interactive knowledge-sharing sessions and tech talks. We try to align this with the areas that individuals are interested in. For example, there might be engineers who are invested in code reviews or those who want to know more about design. We have forums, like design review committees, where engineers can present their engineering design and get feedback. For managers, mentorship is also a key part of the engineering competencies that they’re encouraged to develop.
Our ultimate goal is to ensure our engineers don’t work in a vacuum. We want them to be clear about the impact of their incredible work. There’s a lot of gratification one gets from seeing concrete impact numbers, and we make sure our engineers aspire to and have visibility on this. Having this clear picture gives people the satisfaction that their hard work has resulted in something good. We encourage engineers to look at how many people are using the product features or infrastructure they have built, how much it has improved revenue numbers or even how much cost it has reduced. It’s a great way to see how far you have come and ignite that fire of innovation. There’s no better inspiration than seeing what you and your team have been part of achieving.
If you’re interested in joining our agile engineering teams you can explore our open roles here https://www.cashfree.com/careers/
