Lekshmi Hegde

S

Director of Engineering at Orchard Energy · PostgreSQL, OpenAPI

Orchard Energy
Mumbai, India · IST (UTC+5:30)
10+ years experience
IIIT Bangalore
English, Hindi, Marathi
Hiring
Messaging unavailable

Overview

I've spent 20 years on API platforms - first at Tata Motors, now at Orchard Energy. Wrote the Django service that now handles 50 million requests a day. Reduced cloud spend on public API by 26% in two quarters. Before that: Freshworks and Axis Bank. Most at home with REST and PostgreSQL. Board games, hiking, and terrible puns.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Candidates for the role I'm hiring for
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
Please don't message about
  • Unpaid work or spec projects
  • Crypto token projects
  • Requests to fix your code for free
Skills
DjangoRESTPostgreSQLrate limitingPythonOpenAPI
HiringHiring for a role
closes in 3 months

2 frontend engineer roles open on the public API team in Mumbai

Role
Frontend engineer
Level
Senior
Type
Full-time
Work mode
Hybrid
Compensation
₹30-60 LPA
Team
Public API, 11 people
Start
This quarter
Must have
Production experience with OpenAPI Production experience with rate limiting Ownership of something end to end
Process
Decision within 10 days

Comp ₹40-57 LPA. Four conversations, no take-home. Message me with one thing you shipped that you're proud of.

Mumbai, Indiapythonrate limitingrest
Open

Experience

  1. Director of Engineering
    Nov 2025 - Present
    Orchard Energy · 11 mo · Contract · Mumbai, India
    • Built the experimentation framework 12 product teams use to ship changes safely.
    • Shipped 19 launches on the public API team without a rollback.
  2. Staff Backend Engineer
    Jul 2023 - Nov 2025
    Freshworks · 2 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Mumbai, India
    • Led the migration of 54 services to Python.
  3. Engineering Manager
    Sep 2021 - Jul 2023
    Axis Bank · 1 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Mumbai, India
    • Mentored 5 engineers through their first promotion.
    • Grew the public API team from 4 to 40 engineers.
  4. Senior Engineering Manager
    Mar 2019 - Sep 2021
    Oracle · 2 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Mumbai, India
    • Led the migration of 76 services to Django.
    • Shipped 8 launches on the public API team without a rollback.
  5. Principal Engineer
    Apr 2017 - Jan 2019
    Tata Motors · 1 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Mumbai, India
    • Backed 37 founders at pre-seed and seed.
    • Led or co-led 40 investments, 8 of them now at Series B or later.

Projects

API platforms benchmark
2024

Reproducible benchmarks comparing PostgreSQL and OpenAPI on real workloads.

Side project: a reading list app
2022

Built with REST and Django. 3577 people used it last year.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. IIIT Bangalore
    M.Tech, Computer Science
    2008 - 2010
  2. Amity University
    B.Tech, Computer Science
    2002 - 2006

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