About Me
Thank you for visiting my website. My name is Jayesh Kawli. I am currently residing in Amsterdam and working as a Senior Software Engineer at Navan. Before Navan, I worked as a Software Engineer at Meta for 1.5 years and as an Engineering Manager at Wayfair in Boston for 4 years. On this blog, I write about iOS development, project management, career development, food, and travel-related things.
A little bit about me - I was born and raised in Mumbai, India. I completed my graduation in Bachelor of Engineering from Mumbai University in 2010. I joined TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) for 10 months. I worked on Mainframe and COBOL during my tenure.
After TCS, I decided to opt for a Master in Science (Computer Science) and moved to the USA in 2011. I attended Indian University, Bloomington, and completed my graduation in May 2013.
After graduation, I joined DuetHealth (Now part of DeliverHealth) as a web and mobile developer. Here I worked on ASP.NET, PHP, and mobile development. As a small startup, I got to work on every aspect of the software development lifecycle. This included interviews with customers, keeping up-to-date with customers' requirements and feedback, developing applications, demonstrating technology to healthcare partners, and frequent collaboration with designers, and product managers, and shipping and maintaining mobile apps to the App Store.
After working for DuetHealth for 3 years, I joined Wayfair in Boston as an iOS Engineer. Here, I worked on 3 major apps owned by Wayfair. Namely, Wayfair, AllModern, and JossAndMain all of them focusing on e-commerce selling furniture and décor items to customers in the USA, Canada, and part of Europe. Here I climbed my way from an iOS engineer to the engineering manager of the Cart and Checkout team overseeing the team of 6 iOS and Android developers on this team.
In this role, I was balancing multiple responsibilities and got a good chance to make a long and everlasting impact in the organization. I mentored and onboarded summer interns and new joiners, helped them become senior engineers, worked with directors and product managers to make a roadmap and planning for delivering best-selling features, took a lead on improving app performance, actively involved in creating design systems library and oversaw the career development and growth of my direct reports.
After working for Wayfair for 4 years, I decided to join Meta as a Software Engineer in Boston. Working for Meta came with many challenges. It was in the middle of the pandemic, the competition was cutthroat, people were pretty practical and everybody was there for themselves. However, it also taught me how to deal with difficult and non-cooperating coworkers, how to tackle huge codebase, got rid of my fear of jumping into unknown codebases, and helped me take on leadership spanning multiple verticals.
During my tenure, I worked on some of the exciting projects in the company. This included, but was not limited to Dead code detection and deletion system in Facebook and Instagram apps, running saw-sharpening sessions, leading better engineering championship programs, and mentoring a summer intern and new joiners. Later, I switched to the user well-being team on the Instagram app. Here I helped develop an Account Status feature using Bloks (A cross-platform app development tool) on Android and iOS. In order to improve the platform stability, I also led efforts to improve our E2E testing framework by introducing new tests and improving the stability of existing tests.
After working for Meta for 1.5 years, I realized that this job was taking a toll on my physical and mental health and was not worth it. Aside from job expectations - which I experienced during my previous tenure, I was frustrated with the lack of support from my mentor and engineering manager - Essentially the people I relied on for support and encouragement. In the end, I decided to part with Meta and also realized that status and better pay don't always mean a better living standard.
I moved to Amsterdam in January 2022 and joined Navan as a Senior Software Engineer. Navan was still a startup at that time with a big room to make an impact. Here, I worked on several interesting features using iOS, SwiftUI, UIKit, and Combine to build robust features that our customers loved.
How to get in touch with me?
If you want to contact me directly, please send me a message through LinkedIn. I am not that much active on other social media websites. If you want a faster reply, please send me a message through this form.
What Services do I provide?
With 10+ years of experience in the software industry and a skillset ranging from software engineering, mentorship, leadership, scaling teams, and delivering impactful features to the production, I am available for any kind of software consulting, mentorship workshops, teaching management skills, career counseling and any kind of presentation on a technical topic.
If you want to know more about my skills and experience, please refer to my resume below.
Book a Free Session with me at Topmate.io
You can also book a free 1:1 session with me through Topmate.io. There are other paid sessions for specific services, but if you just want to talk about these services and what you will get out of them, feel free to schedule the first free 1:1 Let's Connect session with this link.
Supporting My Work
Please check out my Patreon and BuyMeACoffee pages too. If you like my articles and want to keep me going on this journey, please consider donating on these platforms. Your support in any form is much appreciated.
