Engineering executive at the intersection of commercial scale and the architecture of
trust: a multi-tenant commerce platform across five countries, and the standards deciding
what automated systems owe the people they act on. Builds category-defining technology for
the digitally underserved — the users a
market reaches last, and the systems that decide about them.
Two halves of one practice: what a system does, and what it owes the person it decides
about. The current work is agentic governance — corrigibility, the right to contest what an automated system decides about you, before the systems
that decide are the only ones left.
Owns engineering for a global commerce platform across five countries: ordering,
marketplace, payments, billing, loyalty, restaurant operations, driver platforms, POS
and white-label SaaS, all multi-tenant. 250 engineers, and by now more AI agents than
engineers, working the same delivery path under the same review.
Inherited frequent critical incidents and made predictable operations the norm without
pausing delivery.
Regulated
Led engineering for an RBI-regulated lender: origination, underwriting, loan
management, collections, and the governance and risk platforms behind them, built in
house rather than bought. Lending-as-a-Service and co-lending orchestration integrated
with partner financial institutions.
Architecture
Payment systems, partner integrations and billing — the money path end to end, from
authorisation and settlement through taxation, invoicing and reconciliation, across
multi-tenant SaaS where every tenant has its own commercial terms. Designed around who
is allowed to do what, and who can prove it afterwards.
M&A
Technical due diligence on acquisition targets, then the integration: consolidating
overlapping platforms onto one stack without disturbing the customers or the revenue
running through them. Payment orchestration and reseller ecosystems carried across
intact.
Assurance
PCI DSS, GDPR and RBI obligations met as engineering practice, not paperwork: threat
modelling and OWASP discipline in the delivery path, zero trust between services,
audit trails that answer a regulator without a reconstruction exercise. Architectures
reviewed by regulators, boards and enterprise customers.
Transformation
Takes engineering organisations AI-native: agents in the delivery path, code and
organisational knowledge made machine-readable, and the governance that keeps both
auditable. Still reviews architecture and reads code.
Enabling the Indian language internet
2003 — 2016
Most of India's 22 official languages could not be rendered, typed or searched on a
computer. That is no longer true. Led the building of the layer that changed it, in the
open, over a decade — and 1.4 billion people came online in their own scripts.
Built it layer by layer, in the code as much as the plan. Desktop: typefaces, shaping
and input methods. Web: encoding, input and search. Mobile: conceived and shipped the
Indic Keyboard, under a
MeitY programme at ICFOSS. AI: corpora, then morphology, then speech — the data Indian
language models now train on. Credited in Firefox's about:credits; further
upstream contributions are
on GitHub.
Institutionalised SMC
and founded the
Indic Project —
the communities that built it. Both continue without me, which was the point.
Made binding
Member of the ICANN Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel, which decides which domain names are
permissible in nine scripts — the writing systems of more than a billion people.
Contributor to ECMAScript, Unicode and IDNA for universal acceptance and complex
script support. IS 16333 (Part 3) now makes Indian language support a condition of
sale for every device in India.
Reading a system for how it fails the people it decides about is the same discipline
that finds a failure mode before it becomes an incident — practised for fifteen years on
national infrastructure, where the stakes made it unavoidable. Software patents, opposed
at each attempt to widen the exclusion in Section 3(k) — 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015. Net
neutrality, when zero-rating was the wedge. And against the expansion of Aadhaar from
2010, then against its pandemic successors — petitioner in the Aarogya Setu case with
SFLC.in and HRLN, and against CoWIN as a precondition for vaccination. The docket is now
cited in legal scholarship on automated evidence. The
record is on the research page.
Contesting a system needs infrastructure of its own.
Moving Republic, a civic-tech startup he founded and ran until 2012, built it for public-interest
organisations across 18 states — their work moved onto the internet, on free software
and open standards, so none of it depended on a platform that could remove it.
Coordination that stayed secure under surveillance, documentation that held up as
evidence, tools that worked in many languages and poor connectivity. Civic tech before
the category had a name, for organisations the technology industry did not serve.
The Layer 8
Current
A publication on the institutional layer of computational systems — where standards,
identity, AI infrastructure, incentives and governance get encoded into infrastructure,
and what that encoding decides on everyone's behalf. Long-form essays, systems analysis
and architectural critique across enterprise AI, sovereign infrastructure, agentic
coordination and public systems.
Read it
Every essay is published on this site and sent to subscribers — the
archive is here, and the newsletter is at
layer8.anivar.net. Selected essays are syndicated to professional and public platforms.
Correspondence
Press enquiries, standards work and research correspondence:
[email protected].
Views expressed are entirely my own and do not represent the views, positions, or
opinions of my employer.