Software Engineer
Shantanu Mahale
Five years at ClearTax crafting products that serve millions — from tax filing to personal finance.
Experience
Five years. One mission.
Building finance products people trust with their money.
Software Engineer II — Frontend
ClearTax
Apr 2025 — Jul 2026
- Led a 3-engineer frontend team owning architecture across Personal Finance, Black web & mobile, ITR, Assisted Filing and MarketingTech — HLD ownership, code review and intern mentoring
- Built and shipped Personal Finance — a net-worth tracking and account aggregation app — on Next.js, Python FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS SQS and AWS Scheduler, and owned its WebView integration into the Black app
- Designed an SSE-based AI chat with interactive in-chat visualizations on a multi-agent text-to-SQL architecture and in-memory DuckDB, serving real-time insights across 15+ financial data types
- Built a Morningstar integration service on FastAPI, using Temporal to orchestrate multi-step ingestion and daily-sync workflows with resilient retries — real-time NAV and fund metadata for 5K+ funds
- Architected a session persistence layer across Black, Personal Finance and the FIU journey iframe using postMessage event bridges to propagate auth and auto-read OTPs, cutting drop-offs by 90%
Software Engineer I — Frontend
ClearTax
Nov 2023 — Mar 2025
- Migrated DIY ITR Filing from a legacy .NET MVC stack to React by building SketchIt, an in-house config-driven UI runtime shipped as an npm package, and scaled it to 6M+ users across India
- Cut FCP from 5s to 2s by reducing bundle size from 800KB to ~200KB per page with code-splitting, dynamic imports and React.lazy + Suspense
- Unified DIY and Assisted Filing with RBAC, and rebuilt the .NET e-verification flow into composable step APIs so a single React frontend drives both journeys
- Built Tax Planning on React and Redux Toolkit with real-time in-browser PDF report generation, widening the ITR marketing funnel and boosting lead conversion by 12%
Mobile Engineer I
ClearTax
Aug 2021 — Oct 2023
- Built Black — a Mutual Fund investments and ITR filing app on React Native + TypeScript — reaching 150K+ MAU and 500K+ downloads
- Implemented dynamic pricing for the ITR marketplace in the Black app via Retool integration, increasing Assisted Filing revenue by 15%
- Built a GraphQL BFF on Node.js on a resolver strategy that collapsed per-screen REST calls into single queries, acting as the app's single source of truth and reducing data usage by 70%
- Migrated the GraphQL build pipeline from Jenkins to GitHub Actions with versioning through AWS ECR, cutting deployment time by 40% (10 → 6 minutes), with observability on Coralogix, Grafana and CubeAPM
Software Engineer Intern
ClearTax
Feb 2021 — Jul 2021
- Built ClearOne 2.0 from scratch on React Native + TypeScript — invoice generation, inventory management, GSTIN lookup and business hierarchy — achieving 100K+ downloads and 10K+ MAU
Projects
Built after hours.
Where finance meets engineering — the things I build for fun.
MF-Pasand
AI mutual-fund recommendations
Pulls ~2,000 mutual funds from AMFI and Kuvera, computes performance metrics (CAGR, volatility, max drawdown), renders each fund into natural language, and embeds it into Elasticsearch dense vectors. A user's persona is encoded into the same space for kNN cosine search.
- ~2,000 funds from AMFI & Kuvera
- 1536-dim OpenAI embeddings
- kNN cosine search + hard filters
- Top 10 funds with explanations
Excella
Financial data platform
A full-stack equity research and screening platform. Ingestion workers periodically pull SEC EDGAR XBRL filings, FRED macro series and yFinance EOD prices into a unified store that computes 142 derived metrics across 12 analytical categories.
- Event-driven ETL pipeline
- 142 metrics, 12 categories
- Interactive 140+ metric screener
- DCF, DDM & residual-income valuation
Docubr
Technical documentation app
A full-stack documentation platform on Next.js 14, Convex and Clerk that lets teams author and publish API docs, developer guides and knowledge bases from a BlockNote block editor with EdgeStore-backed image uploads.
- 10+ rich documentation components
- Syntax highlighting, 20+ languages
- Full-text search & scroll-spy TOC
- Radix UI + Tailwind design system
Games
Just for the fun of it.
Browser classics, rebuilt from scratch.
Wordle
Daily word puzzle
A faithful take on the five-letter word game — six guesses, per-letter color feedback, and an interactive on-screen keyboard with smooth tile-reveal animations.
- Six-guess word puzzle
- Color-coded letter hints
- On-screen keyboard
- Tile-reveal animations
Tic-Tac-Toe
The classic, reimagined
The timeless 3×3 game with instant win detection, clear turn indicators, and a one-tap reset to run it back.
- Classic 3×3 grid
- Automatic win detection
- Turn indicators
- One-tap restart
Tetris
Stack, clear, repeat
A browser build of the block-stacking arcade classic — falling tetrominoes, line-clear scoring, and responsive keyboard controls that speed up as you go.
- Falling tetromino pieces
- Line-clear scoring
- Keyboard controls
- Increasing speed
Mini Apps
Small tools, fully built.
Handy little apps — simple, useful, and mine.
Task Management Dashboard
Drag-and-drop task board
A Kanban-style dashboard for organising work across columns. Create tasks, drag them through their lifecycle, and keep an at-a-glance view of everything in flight.
- Drag-and-drop tasks
- Multiple status columns
- Add & edit tasks
- Clean dashboard view
Habit Tracker
One square a day
Track any number of habits on a contributions-style grid. Log a day with a click, watch streaks build, and keep the whole history in your browser.
- Daily habit logging
- Streak tracking
- Contribution-style grid
- Local persistence
Toolkit
The stack behind the work.
Languages
Frontend
Backend
AI & LLMs
Databases
Build & Infra
Developer Tools
Background
Education & credentials.
Vellore Institute of Technology
Sep 2017 — May 2021B.Tech in Computer Science · Chennai, Tamil Nadu
CGPA 8.78 / 10.0CFA Institute
Chartered Financial AnalystPassed Levels I & II — pursuing the charter, with a deep interest in valuation and quantitative analysis.
Achievements
- Spot Award for unifying the DIY and Assisted Filing productsJun 2024
- 2nd Runner Up, Clear Hackathon — an AI-chat based personal finance appFeb 2024
Let's talk
Have something in mind?
I'm always open to new opportunities, interesting projects, or a chat about tech and finance.