Pre-answered
Questions
The objections a hiring manager would reasonably raise about my record. I would rather answer them here than be asked them cold.
The questions
Why does a mechanical engineer run capital markets engineering?
Four years at DENSO doing new-product quality on Toyota and Honda programmes taught me that reliability is a process discipline rather than an act of individual talent — statistical control, root cause analysis, launch readiness, supplier qualification. Almost all of that transfers directly to shipping software to institutions that cannot tolerate defects. The degree is where I started; it is not what I have been doing for the last decade.
You still run your own company. Are you actually available?
Hashtag is a mature product in steady-state operation. I built it, scaled the team to 21 at its peak, and it now runs with five people on a low-maintenance recurring revenue base. I took on a thirty-person division elsewhere precisely because that is where the growth was. It is not a competing commitment and it is not a fallback plan.
What do you actually write yourself?
Not production code, and I would rather say so than be caught out. I built our automated order-validation harness in Python myself because manual QA could not establish calculation correctness at volume. I ship applications with AI-assisted tooling. I came up through ten years of PHP, MySQL and Flutter. I read and review our Java and .NET well enough to diagnose problems and challenge design decisions — my technical leads write the FIX engine, and I answer for the platform it sits in.
Why leave a role where you head a division and report to the CEO?
The scope is real and I am not running from it. What I want next is a larger platform and a market where capital markets domain depth is priced properly. Kochi caps what I can be paid for it.
Why Kochi?
Family and a company I built are both here. It has not limited what I have worked on — I run a division delivering to Gulf institutions from here, and I work across two countries daily. It does limit local compensation, which is why I am looking.
Do you know Java and Spring Boot?
I read and review both. I do not write Spring Boot and would not claim to. That distinction matters more to me than the extra line on a CV.
Anything else
If there is a question here I have not answered, ask it directly.