ENGINEERING TEAM LEAD · AMSTERDAM


Dugani.

Vishwanath Dugani

I’m Vishwanath, 36, a hands-on engineering team lead based in Amsterdam. I build Python backends, AI systems, and cloud platforms.

At Simvia, I lead the engineering team, set technical direction, and write production code. My role also covers platform engineering, setting up DevOps, and managing cloud infrastructure.

Nationality: Dutch

02 / EXPERIENCE

Experience.

I started with electronics and embedded systems. That took me into research, manufacturing, EV charging, and eventually the software I work on today.

2024 — NOW

Simvia

Amsterdam

Team Lead · Apr 2024 – present

I lead the engineering team, set technical direction, and write production code across Python services, AI document processing, and compliance search. I work with the C-suite on GenAI priorities and delivery.

I also lead platform engineering: the AWS infrastructure as code, CI/CD, monitoring, and the ways of working around planning, code review, testing, and releases.

The product work spans document extraction and review, retrieval with source evidence, client-facing APIs and an MCP server, and SharePoint-integrated onboarding.

2021 — 2024

EVBox

Amsterdam

Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead

Building backend services and tools for connected EV chargers, while managing and mentoring engineers. A mix of telemetry, fleet operations, testing, APIs, and helping people make sense of the data.

2018 — 2021

EFFECT Photonics

Eindhoven

Senior Software Engineer

Working with physicists and production teams on software for optical transceiver manufacturing, device tuning, and research. I built full-stack tools, dashboards, and automated testing and delivery workflows.

2016 — 2018

Philips

Eindhoven

Software Developer

Building Python measurement systems, testing tools, and interfaces for research data. This was a chance to work closely with scientists and firmware engineers, and make manual experiments repeatable.

And a little further back…+
2016 / SCANIA

A thesis in high-performance computing.

At Scania, I studied Linux cluster performance and benchmarked finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics applications for my master’s thesis.

2015–2016 / WATTY

Energy data and embedded hardware.

As an intern and part-time data integrity analyst, I worked on GSM firmware, hardware testing, and automating data cleaning for disaggregation algorithms.

2012–2014 / BRADY CORPORATION

Learning the business side.

A business analyst role working on reporting, forecasting, and financial analysis — an earlier part of my path before the move to Sweden.

2011–2012 / LI2-INNOVATIONS

Starting with a balancing robot.

As a junior developer, I worked on a two-wheeled self-balancing robot, using motion sensors, filtering, and closed-loop PID control.

EDUCATION

M.Sc. Embedded Systems

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Stockholm, Sweden · 2014–2016

B.E. Electrical & Electronics Engineering

M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology

Bangalore, India · 2008–2012

03 / SOME OF MY WORK

Projects &
technical decisions.

Grouped by where the work happened. Each entry covers the problem, what I built, and the decisions behind it — and most open into a small example showing how the system responds to a change in workload, evidence, or input.

AmsterdamApr 2024 — present5 projects

Simvia

A supply-chain compliance platform. A multi-tenant Django backend, an LLM document pipeline, and the AWS infrastructure underneath both.

AI / DOCUMENT INTELLIGENCE

Making sense of messy documents

A Django and LLM pipeline that turns certificates, audit reports, and lab results arriving as scans and PDFs into structured, reviewable data.

My roleArchitecture, implementation & platform
PythonLLMsEvaluationAWS
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The challenge

Supply-chain documents arrive in many formats. Manual review made turning them into consistent, usable product data a recurring operational burden.

What I built

I designed and built the pipeline end to end: staged OCR that turns scans into searchable pages, then classification, field extraction, entity matching, verification, and translation. Each stage runs as its own asynchronous task with its own model and timeout, so a fast classification never waits behind a slow extraction. A configuration-driven layer lets non-engineers add document types without changing code.

The engineering decisions

Model calls are the scarce resource, so context budgets and a shared rate limiter sit in front of them rather than in each caller. Quality is measured, not assumed: a deterministic scorer compares extracted fields against human-approved labels, and reviewer corrections feed back as new labels. Reusable components keep each new document type from becoming a separate implementation.

The outcome

Structured data across roughly 500 document types, replacing manual review and making document support easier to extend.

IngestClassifyExtractEvaluate
AI / KNOWLEDGE RETRIEVAL

Finding answers, with the source attached

Retrieval over the whole document estate, so a compliance analyst gets an answer and the page it came from rather than a search results list.

My roleRetrieval design & implementation
RAGEmbeddingsVector search
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The challenge

Answering supply-chain compliance questions meant manually searching a large collection of unstructured documents. Finding the evidence could take analysts days.

What I built

I built retrieval on top of the OCR pipeline, embedding documents at page level so a match carries its page reference with it. Vector search selects the candidate pages, and the answer is generated only from what was retrieved, with each claim shown next to the page that supports it.

Why the source matters

For compliance work, an answer needs a path back to its evidence. Source visibility helps analysts inspect the underlying material and prepare an audit response.

The outcome

Questions that required days of manual searching could be answered in seconds, enabling same-day audit responses.

QuestionRetrieveAnswer + sources
AI / PRODUCT DELIVERY

Helping customers get started

Onboarding a new customer used to mean an engineer hand-mapping their document formats. An LLM step now proposes the mapping and a person confirms it.

My roleWorkflow redesign & LLM integration
LLMsWorkflow designProduct thinking
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The challenge

Every new client depended on a manual configuration step. That delivery bottleneck slowed onboarding and held up the sales cycle.

What I changed

I rebuilt onboarding around the extraction pipeline: a customer's sample documents are parsed, a model proposes the field mapping, and the confirmed result is saved as a reusable configuration rather than as code. A SharePoint integration pulls documents in automatically, so customers keep working where their files already live.

The leadership connection

This work sits within my partnership with the C-suite on GenAI strategy: translating business goals into shipped capability and choosing applications where AI creates practical value.

The outcome

Onboarding moved from weeks to days. Removing the delivery bottleneck also shortened the sales cycle from months to days.

New customerLLM onboardingReady to use
PLATFORM / AGENT INTEGRATION

Connecting agents to useful tools

A public API and an MCP server that let customer agents query the platform, with scoped permissions and an audit trail on every call.

My roleAPI design, permissions & implementation
MCPREST APIsAccess controlMulti-tenancy
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The challenge

Customers need their AI agents to work with platform data and tools. Giving an agent that capability also means defining what it can access and making its actions traceable.

What I built

I built the MCP server and the client-facing REST API, both sitting behind API keys, tenant isolation, and per-scope permissions. Alongside them is a natural-language query tool: a model is given the data model and writes the query, but the generated SQL passes a read-only guard before it ever reaches the database, so anything that is not a single plain SELECT is refused.

The engineering principle

The integration boundary is part of the product. An agent is an unpredictable caller, so the interface has to be safe by construction rather than by instruction: what it may reach is decided outside the model, and every action it takes stays traceable.

The outcome

Client-facing integration capabilities that connect customer agents to the platform while keeping access scoped and actions auditable.

Client agentMCP / APIScoped tools
PLATFORM / CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

The platform the product runs on

The AWS infrastructure, deployment pipeline, and operating practices behind the platform, defined as code and owned by the team that ships on it.

My rolePlatform engineering, DevOps & infrastructure
AWSCDKECSCeleryCI/CDObservability
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The challenge

An AI pipeline and a web application are very different workloads sharing one codebase. Long document jobs should never slow down a request a customer is waiting on, and several teams need somewhere realistic to test before anything reaches production.

What I built

The whole environment is described in TypeScript with AWS CDK: containerised services on ECS, a managed Postgres database, Redis, load balancers, and a CDN-served frontend. The Django workload is split into separate services rather than one pool — the customer-facing API, the public API, the admin application, and background workers that are separated by job type, including a dedicated one for AI document processing, so a queue of long extractions cannot starve the rest.

The engineering decisions

Every environment comes from the same code, with production as the base and each development environment as a small set of overrides, so a team can have a full stack of its own without a parallel configuration to maintain. Deployments are version bumps in the repository rather than manual steps, which makes each release reviewable and reversible. Dashboards and alarms are defined next to the services they watch, so new infrastructure arrives already observable.

The outcome

Infrastructure the team can change safely: isolated environments per team, releases that are traceable to a commit, and workloads that scale independently of one another.

CommitPipelineVersioned deployMonitored service

Amsterdam2021 — 20241 project

EVBox

Backend services for a fleet of connected EV chargers, from telemetry ingestion to the tools people used to operate it.

BACKEND / CONNECTED INFRASTRUCTURE

The systems behind EV charging

Backend services, telemetry pipelines, and tools that help people operate and understand a fleet of connected chargers.

My roleTeam leadership, backend & infrastructure
PythonAsyncIOREST APIsDocker
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The challenge

EV chargers generate high volumes of telemetry. Operators need dependable device status and remote operations, and downtime can leave a driver unable to charge.

What I built

I built and scaled asynchronous, event-driven services to ingest and process charger data, alongside backend APIs for fleet status, diagnostics, remote operations, and reporting.

My role as a lead

I managed and mentored engineers while contributing to the backend and infrastructure. I also worked with developers and QA engineers on charger testing APIs, internal tools, and dashboards for understanding test data.

The outcome

Telemetry processing and fleet management capabilities used by engineering and operations, with reliability, concurrency, and performance central to the design.

DevicesAsync pipelinesFleet operations

Eindhoven2016 — 20211 project

EFFECT Photonics & Philips

Software for photonics research and manufacturing, built alongside physicists, operators, and firmware engineers.

FULL-STACK / AUTOMATION

Software for the lab and production line

Working with scientists and operators to turn experiments, measurements, and manufacturing steps into repeatable workflows.

My roleFull-stack software & research collaboration
PythonFull-stackTest automation
A few more detailsClose the notes+

The challenge

Precision hardware needs repeatable measurement and dependable workflows. Scientists need room to explore; manufacturing operators need consistency across stations.

At EFFECT Photonics

I designed and built a full-stack system for the production of SFP optical transceiver modules: executing test sequences, capturing measurements, tracking progress and yield, and coordinating station workflows. I also worked directly with physicists on device characterisation and tuning tools.

At Philips

I built Python measurement, test, and data-acquisition systems for photonics research, along with visualisation tools. Working with scientists and firmware engineers taught me to turn experimental methods into usable software.

The outcome

Manual research operations became repeatable and unattended. Production operators gained integrated tooling, and automated testing and CI/CD helped standardise builds and releases at EFFECT Photonics.

ExperimentRepeatable toolingProduction workflow

These are summaries of my contributions. There’s no proprietary code or customer data here — just a little context about the work.

04 / HOW I WORK

Hands-on engineering.
Team leadership.

I stay hands-on with architecture, implementation, and delivery while helping the team do good work. My approach is pragmatic: start simple, keep the code maintainable, and add complexity when the problem calls for it.

Design and build.

I take systems from architecture into implementation: Python services, asynchronous pipelines, LLM extraction, retrieval, and APIs. I work through the details alongside the team, with clear boundaries, readable code, and tests that make changes easier.

Lead the engineering work.

I set technical direction, review code, and mentor engineers. I establish practical ways of working across planning, testing, and releases, and help the team make decisions and take ownership of delivery.

Own the platform.

I set up DevOps practices and CI/CD, manage cloud infrastructure, and stay involved in deployment, monitoring, and production support. I choose tools and operating practices the team can understand, maintain, and grow with.

TOOLS I COME BACK TO

Python / Django / FastAPI / PostgreSQL / AWS / Docker

Also: LLMs, RAG, MCP, AsyncIO, Redis, Pytest, CI/CD, Sentry, TypeScript, and React. The choice depends on the problem.

05 / OUTSIDE WORK

Outside work.

I enjoy bouldering and photography. I’m also a certified Open Water Diver.

06 / SAY HELLO

Get in touch.

You can reach me here to talk about a project, discuss engineering, or just say hello.

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