People of OST: Rachin Kapoor, Senior Director Engineering
Rachin Kapoor is OST’s Senior Director Engineering in Pune, India. Rachin has 10+ years experience in software engineering, previously working with frontend web development, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, CSS, Ajax, and node engineering. Rachin is innovative, strategic and hands-on with technology, executing with deep technical expertise and proven ability in leading development of high technology products, streamlining efficiency, improving processes and growing operational competency.
Tell us about yourself. Where are you from? What’s your background?
Let me start with my family background. I was born and grew up in Bhilai, India, a cosmopolitan city known for its steel industry. My father was an engineer and retired as Executive Director of the Steel Authority of India. My mother started as a beautician who eventually turned into an entrepreneur and set up a small business of jewelries. They always encouraged me to find my passion and work towards it. They also taught me that there’s absolutely no substitute to hard work and that’s something I keep close to my heart. I graduated high school in 2002 from Delhi public school Bhilai and in 2006 I completed my Engineering and Information Technology degree from Bhilai Institute of Technology.
As far as my career, I have 10+ years of experience. I’ve been working in the field of software development since April 2007. I started as an SQL engineer in a services company. Later, I was asked to move to front end because ajax was a new thing during that time. In 2012, I joined Jason, Nishith and Sunil as a software architect. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to get my hands on and lead many technologies. The open enrollment here at OST allows me to question and challenge or design decisions, which I feel eventually contributes towards making a product better and better every day.
What led your interest in blockchain technology?
To be honest, I wasn’t a big blockchain fan in the beginning. Last year while working on Pepo, we wanted to incentivize our users in a way that they’re really valued. We found that blockchain technology is an open decentralized and trustless technology that empowers end users and can help us achieve our aim. We dug deeper into this and we found that it evolved a lot, but there was still challenges around it. There are some hard problems, like user experience and scalability that still need to be solved. The idea that we will create an open source solution, which is not just for Pepo, but for also mainstream adoption, really motivated me to learn and contribute in blockchain technology.
What does your role as Senior Director Engineering at OST entail?
My core responsibilities include anything that’s, front end with ost.com, KIT, or KYC. My team implements all the user experiences that you see in these websites. Beyond front end, I contribute towards architectural design and implementation of all Apps with KIT, OST VIEW, OpenST.js and SDK’s. In all products made front end of backend, I need to be mindful about their performance and security at all times. I’m required to groom and mentor my team in front in and other teams in non-js and web3-js application development.
What projects are you currently working on at OST?
Coming to my projects, as you mentioned, we released OpenST 0.9.4 for last Friday. I was part of the interaction layer team in that project. Moving forward, I shall be working on client SDK’s that should provide key management solutions for application and new users, mosaic.js which is an interaction of Mosaic protocol, and server side SDK’s which should facilitate integration between our partner companies and KIT. Once we are ready with all these SDK’s, I think the next week project will be to integrate these into KIT in a scalable manner.
What’s something about you that other don’t usually know?
I’ll tell you three things. First, during our ICO here, I along with my team, successfully brought down a scam site that copied us. During that time we also built telegram bots that flag us about scammers and spammers on our telegram channels. The second thing that I would like to tell is regarding my pet. His name is Johnny, he’s a dashan munisha and has been in my family for the last three and a half years. The third thing that most people don’t know about me is that I found my passion towards software product programming back in 1996 and had created it in my first program in QBasic, which was a 16-bit animation program.
THANK YOU, RACHIN!
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About OST
OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST Partners reach more than 200 million end-users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, 500 Startups.
