Waypoint 01 // The Road

Sahil Talwar

Engineering executive. Director of Software Engineering at Oracle, VP of Engineering at RedShelf, co-founder of Ungambled. 15+ years building and running platforms at scale. Washington, DC.

50Engineering org led at Oracle

30BAPI calls / day

99.99%Availability

$150MARR platform owned

Follow the road Resume

Open to Director / Sr. Director / VP roles. Remote or DC.

Waypoint 02 // The City

Career, by district

Four organizations. Each one bigger than the last, or built from nothing.

District 01

RedShelf

VP of Engineering

Feb 2024 – Oct 2025

99.9% availability for 8M+ users; 20M API calls/day.
+20% delivery velocity by rebuilding the SDLC around AI-agent tooling with human-in-the-loop review gates.
Org restructure: ~20% more output with 25% fewer people.
Launched a net-new product: +10% ARR, +50% SOM in-year. Cut cost-to-serve ~25% and TTR ~30% on the legacy monolith.

District 02

Oracle

Director of Software Engineering

Apr 2018 – Jul 2022 · Manager → Sr Manager → Director in 4 years

Owned the $150M ARR Data Management Platform.
50-person org, 7 teams, 4 global offices, led through engineering managers.
~750 instances, 30B API calls/day, 1M+ TPS peak, sub-22ms SLAs, 99.99% availability.
Led the IBM SoftLayer → OCI migration, monolith to microservices. SOC2/GDPR/CCPA with clean-room architectures. 4 departures in 4 years.

District 03

Ungambled

Co-Founder

Oct 2021 – present · advisory since 2024

Bootstrapped the flagship product to market at <$10K/mo burn through a seed round.
Added 2 revenue streams; doubled ARPC.
Owned taxes, compliance, and corporate structure. Shipped iOS, Android, and Web.

District 04

Excella Consulting

.NET Specialty Area Lead & Senior Consultant

2012 – 2015

Led 20 engineers on a $40M modernization of a pension platform: $16B AUM, 65K participants.
Architected calculation engines with 100% precision; in production since 2015.
All 9 milestones on time and on budget.

Earlier

Lanetix, Senior Software Engineer, led 2 teams · Bitgrid, CTO, MVP in 6 months with two engineers · Solers · GeoEye · Microsoft, intern.

Education

Virginia Tech

B.S. Computer Science + B.A. Philosophy. Minor in Mathematics.

2006 – 2010

Waypoint 03 // The Observatory

Creed and leadership

It's a waste of the most precious gift, existence, to drift through life without intention. You make yourself through your actions, so choose to be someone worth being.
— Sahil Talwar

How I lead

01
First principles over familiarity
Nobody knows the whole stack. Reason from fundamentals and make the call.
02
Determinism over hype
Predictable, repeatable, verifiable. If it cannot be measured, it did not ship.
03
Zero fluff
Blunt diagnosis. No corporate softening.
04
People stay
4 departures in 4 years at Oracle. A pipeline of engineering managers built at RedShelf.

Undergraduate astrophysics research: modeled whether supermassive black hole spin predicts host-galaxy size. No correlation found. A null result is still a result.

Waypoint 04 // The Archive

Off duty

What is on the shelves when the pager is quiet.

Shelf 01

Reading

Philosophy first: Russell, ethics, history of science. Then epic fantasy, hard sci-fi, noir. Gladstone, Jordan, Asimov, Corey, Le Guin, Chandler, Doyle, Liu Cixin, Reynolds.

Shelf 02

Music

Melodic progressive house and synthwave. Kazusa & Shingo Nakamura, Chicane, The Midnight, Starcadian, Ben Böhmer, ODESZA. The radio in the corner plays an original generative score in that style. Press M.

Shelf 03

Video games

Final Fantasy, StarCraft, systems-heavy games. Played on a PC I built myself.

Shelf 04

Driving

Long forest roads at night. Where hard problems get solved.

Shelf 05

Physics

Undergraduate astrophysics research on whether supermassive black hole spin predicts host-galaxy size. It does not.

Waypoint 05 // Orbit

Contact

Hiring for a Director, Sr. Director, or VP seat? Send the brief. I reply within two business days.

LinkedIn Email

Docking // PWEP Consulting

The station ahead is my consulting practice: fractional CTO, multi-agent AI architecture, technical due diligence.

Board the station