Alankrit Chona

On a mission to reinvent how security operations work - using AI agents that think, reason, and act. We’re building the future of cyber defense: autonomous, contextual, and radically more efficient.

Head of Platform & Data Engineering Led the design and build-out of Kanmon’s data platform, enabling the company to assess credit risk for businesses with speed and accuracy. - Established a comprehensive ELT and reverse-ETL stack, integrating diverse data sources into a single platform for analysis. - Made key vendor and architecture decisions (Snowflake, Hevo Data, Census, dbt), balancing scalability, cost, and developer productivity. - Implemented end-to-end pipeline optimizations to reduce latency and improve cost efficiency. - Built foundational data infrastructure that supported Kanmon’s core business of underwriting small-business credit. Key Technologies: Snowflake, dbt, Hevo Data, Census

Explored ideas in the e-commerce and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) space: - Built an e-commerce search engine for BNPL products, devising algorithms to scrape and categorize millions of products across hundreds of merchant sites. - Developed a product discovery experience that surfaced items eligible for BNPL payment plans. - Work attracted external interest, leading to an acquisition offer and a Principal Engineer role at BNPL company Sezzle (https://sezzle.com/).

As part of the early engineering team at Spotnana, I focused on establishing core platform foundations and engineering best practices: - Defined and standardized database and ORM choices to support long-term scalability. - Ramped up the engineering team on Spring Boot and Functional Programming in Java (streams) to accelerate developer productivity. - Implemented foundational authentication/authorization, error & exception handling (gRPC + Java), and metrics logging/reporting to ensure reliability and observability. - Championed microservices best practices, setting patterns for modular, maintainable services across the platform. Key Technologies: Java (Spring Boot, Streams/Functional Programming), gRPC, Microservices Architecture

I joined Afterpay US as one of the founding engineers, helping build the backend and infrastructure that supported Afterpay’s successful launch in the United States. I served as engineering lead on several core projects: - Search & Discovery: Drove the launch of product and category search on Afterpay.com (beyond just store name search) using ElasticSearch. Designed measurement pipelines with LaunchDarkly and Amplitude, which showed a 30% improvement in click-out rates. - Regulatory Compliance: Led engineering efforts to ensure compliance with US late fee regulations—redesigning fee structures, communications (email/SMS), and payment batch jobs to meet requirements. - Promotions & Discounts: Contributed to building the first version of Afterpay’s promotion and discount flow, creating new growth levers for merchants and users. Key Technologies: Java Spring ecosystem, Ruby on Rails, Python Flask, ElasticSearch My contributions were instrumental in enabling Afterpay’s expansion into the US market and setting up the technical foundations for scale. Afterpay was later acquired by Block in one of the largest fintech acquisitions to date.

At Twitter, I worked across infrastructure and product engineering teams, contributing to systems that reached hundreds of millions of users daily. Notifications Infrastructure (Scala/Finagle/Thrift | 2016–2018): - Built and scaled a suite of backend microservices that powered the fanout and real-time templating of notifications (push, SMS, and email) at millions of requests per minute with low latency. - Migrated notification settings for billions of devices to a new storage architecture, enabling greater flexibility, speed, and reliability. - Introduced infrastructure for template versioning and rich notifications, reducing time to launch new experiments from weeks to minutes. - Contributed to infrastructure improvements that increased notification throughput capacity to billions per day. User Onboarding (Android | 2014–2016): - Designed and shipped Android product features to improve onboarding for new users, leveraging large-scale A/B testing to optimize retention and activation. - Helped shape the new-user experience during a critical growth phase for Twitter. Key Technologies: Scala, Finagle, Thrift, MapReduce, Android (Java)