Tushar Laad, photographed against a dark background

Tushar Laad

Data engineer at DoorFeed. Your friendly neighbourhood 0-to-1 engineer.

I take systems from an empty repository to production. Regulatory data, agent platforms and the backends under them by day; a four-product software lab the rest of the time.

London, UK

Nothing starts clean.

No schema, no precedent, no obvious first move. Taking a system from an empty repository to something people depend on is the whole job.

Then it ships.

Treacle went from an empty repository to the Play Store with one engineer across the backend, the app and the infrastructure.

The Next.js backend behind Treacle, written solo.
API routes
Architected and shipped for Android alone, built cross-platform on React Native.
engineer

Four more, on my own time.

MemryLab, XpenseLab, HyredLab and EdytLab, all live under LabyNator. One person from ideation through deployment and support.

memrylab.com, xpenselab.com, hyredlab.com and edytlab.com all resolve.
products live
Now

August 2026. Building the agent platform and regulatory data service at DoorFeed. Shipping EdytLab, a conversational audio editor in Rust, on the side.

Shipped

A regulatory data service from empty repo to production in 27 days. The agent platform under a property analyst. A dating app shipped alone, live on both stores.

Stack
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • Rust
  • Go
  • PostgreSQL
  • FastAPI
  • Dagster
  • Polars
  • PySpark
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • Next.js

LabyNator

An independent software lab and the parent company for four live SaaS products. One person from ideation through to deployment and support. labynator.com

The MemryLab timeline view: four years of imported documents as a zoomable monthly bar chart, with a period table beneath it and the ten analysis views down the left

MemryLab

Shipped

A searchable timeline of how your thinking changed.

Point it at your journals, chat exports, notes and archives. It builds a visual timeline of how your beliefs and interests moved over years. Everything stays on the machine.

import formats
Obsidian, Notion, Evernote, social archives and messaging exports, behind one detection layer.
import formats
installer
The whole app, including the search index, with no vector database.
installer
telemetry calls
Nothing leaves the machine. No cloud dependency.
telemetry calls
  • Rust
  • Tauri 2
  • React 19
  • SQLite FTS5
  • D3
  • Ollama
The EdytLab editor: four audio tracks with waveforms, markers and a volume envelope on the left, and on the right an agent turn that ran three editing tools and reported what it changed

EdytLab

Shipped

Describe an audio edit in English. It renders.

Drop in stems and ask for the mashup you want. An agent plans the operations, the DSP runs locally in Rust, and stem separation and transcription happen on your own machine.

commits
Pure Rust DSP with ONNX running Demucs and Whisper on device.
commits
editing tools exposed to the agent
The agent plans a sequence over them; session state lives in a branchable graph.
editing tools exposed to the agent
  • Rust
  • Tauri 2
  • symphonia
  • fundsp
  • ONNX
  • Demucs
  • Whisper
The HyredLab dashboard: a pipeline board of tracked applications with stage counts across applied, screening, interview, offer, rejected and ghosted

HyredLab

Shipped

A job tracker that reads your inbox for you.

Syncs with Gmail and turns the mess of application confirmations, rejections and recruiter threads into a tracked pipeline, without any manual entry.

  • Next.js 16
  • PostgreSQL
  • Prisma
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash
  • NextAuth
The XpenseLab dashboard: income, expenses and savings totals across the top, a seven day income against expenses chart, and the most recent transactions with their categories

XpenseLab

Shipped

Personal finance that categorises itself.

Income, expenses, budgets, loans and EMIs, with AI categorisation and optional client-side encryption. The largest codebase in the lab.

commits
The largest codebase in the lab, subscriptions and GDPR included.
commits
  • Next.js 16
  • Firebase
  • Genkit
  • Gemini
  • Stripe

Treacle

A separate company, not part of the lab. I joined as founding engineer and shipped the product alone.

Treacle

Shipped

An AI dating app with no swiping.

Voice profiling instead of forms. You talk, it listens, and it debriefs with you after dates to learn what actually worked. Architected and shipped alone, live on the Play Store.

API routes
The Next.js backend behind Treacle, written solo.
API routes
matching dimensions
Psychological domains across values, communication and lifestyle.
matching dimensions
engineer
Architected and shipped for Android alone, built cross-platform on React Native.
engineer
  • Next.js
  • React Native
  • ElevenLabs
  • WebRTC
  • Neo4j
  • pgvector
  • AWS

What people I worked with said

  • Vinay MehendiVinay Mehendi, PhDChief Executive, OceanFrogsSenior to Tushar at OceanFrogsSep 2023
    He started as a website developer, took on a data engineer role, built APIs for us. He performed beautifully. When we assigned him his first labelling and machine learning project, he came back not only with a solution but alternative approaches, pros and cons, and all documented well.
  • Joel Joseph JoyJoel Joseph JoyAzure and Databricks EngineerManaged Tushar directly at AppsatileMar 2026
    He not only delivered on assigned responsibilities but regularly went beyond expectations, investing additional time to understand underlying systems and improve solution quality.
  • Srujan PSrujan PProduct and Engineering Manager, OceanFrogsManaged Tushar directly at OceanFrogsSep 2023
    Excellent skills at building data pipelines, REST APIs and Docker. A great team player who communicates effectively and shares knowledge generously.
  • Suleiman Muhammad SaboSuleiman Muhammad SaboCybersecurity researcherWorked on the same teamMar 2024
    We were faced with the complex challenge of implementing end-to-end encryption, particularly how to securely store and manage encryption keys. He devised an elegant solution that balanced security with usability: storing public keys on our servers while keeping private keys on users' local devices.
  • Pranjal UpadhyayaPranjal UpadhyayaSoftware Development EngineerWorked on the same teamNov 2023
    An excellent developer and data engineer with extensive experience in data scraping, data mining, data labelling, data analytics and ML. Very proactive in taking up problems and coming up with novel solutions for them.

Where I have worked

Some of these ran at the same time. That is deliberate rather than a typo: the lab and Treacle were built alongside a full-time job. The bars below sit on one shared axis, so the overlap is visible instead of looking like a mistake.

20202026
Now

Apr 2026 to Present

London, on-site

Data Engineer, DoorFeed

A property investment platform across the UK and France. I build the regulatory data the analysis stands on, the backend that serves it, and the agent that turns it into analyst output.

How the rent-regulation service works
  • Built the regulatory service that answers what rent a property can legally charge, from empty repository to production in 27 days.
  • Sourced the data where no clean feed existed, from public decrees, council mapping services and boundary sets, with every figure traceable to the rule that set it.
  • Built the backend and tool server under the analysis agent, and the valuation logic applying French rent control and English social and affordable rent rules.
  • Own reliability for long-running agent runs: failure detection, recovery, and the telemetry behind both.
Founding roles

Nov 2025 to Apr 2026

UK, remote

Concurrent

Founder, LabyNator

An independent software lab and parent company for four live SaaS products.

  • Founded the lab that builds, ships and operates MemryLab, XpenseLab, HyredLab and EdytLab.
  • Ran the full product lifecycle on each, from ideation through development, deployment and customer experience.

Jan 2026 to Mar 2026

London, hybrid

Concurrent

Founding Engineer, Treacle

Architected and shipped an AI-native dating app to the Play Store as the solo engineer.

  • Designed a 32-dimension matching algorithm across psychological domains, with weekly Inngest jobs, confidence-gated scoring and an admin review workflow.
  • Built the ElevenLabs voice architecture, speech to text into an LLM and back through text to speech over WebRTC, with real-time prosody analysis feeding a Neo4j graph.
  • Shipped a Next.js backend across 109 API routes, React Native on Expo SDK 55, PostgreSQL with pgvector over six embedding tables, Redis and AWS, with AES-256 on sensitive profile data.
  • Built a Sentry observability facade across backend and mobile, enforced by ESLint rules and 38 tests, plus CI/CD through EAS builds and auto-deploy to AWS App Runner.

Jun 2024 to Mar 2026

Gateshead, on-site

Founding Software Engineer, Data, Appsatile

Architected the data platform and led the team building on it.

  • Architected a 7-layer composable data system with cross-app interoperability, type safety and versioning, and designed cell-based multi-tenancy using row-level security with dedicated cells for enterprise tenants.
  • Reached sub-millisecond latency through 3-tier caching across Caffeine, Redis and PostgreSQL.
  • Built a Go-based master data management platform with fuzzy matching and golden record merging, ingesting from PostgreSQL, NATS JetStream, Redis and MinIO.
  • Recovered 165 properties and 8,395 expenses from corrupt legacy systems with safe replay, through a FastAPI and Next.js CMS on a dynamic JSONB entity framework.
  • Built a RAG system on ChromaDB and Ollama with auto-indexing and semantic search, deployed as an MCP server, alongside governance covering classification, retention and field-level masking.
  • Deployed production Kubernetes on AWS with Keycloak, Kafka, Prometheus and Grafana, automated through Helm and Kustomize.
  • Led a 5-developer team and authored the 20-page platform specification with PlantUML diagrams and architecture decision records.
Before that

Apr 2024 to Jun 2024

Newcastle upon Tyne

Data Scientist, Hexis Lab

Brought generative AI into a cosmetic science platform.

  • Integrated GPT-4o and spaCy for ingredient analysis with sentiment scoring and trend forecasting across 30,000 European Commission regulatory data points.
  • Prototyped a vision assistant for personalised skincare recommendations, deployed through FastAPI and Docker.
  • Built interactive 3D molecular rendering in React and Three.js.

Apr 2022 to Oct 2023

Pune, remote

Data Engineer, OceanFrogs

Started on WordPress builds, moved onto the data team, ended up owning the enrichment product and the APIs on top of it.

  • Owned the Data Enrichment API product on FastAPI, MSSQL, NGINX and Docker over EC2, and built the PySpark ETL behind it for business intelligence datasets serving B2B customers.
  • Migrated technographics labeling to Python and PySpark, making processing 400 percent faster and 50 percent more accurate.
  • Designed and deployed REST APIs that increased data enrichment capacity by 60 percent.
  • Implemented NLP-based keyword extraction for a 20 percent improvement in enrichment rate.
  • Wrote SQL stored procedures that reorganised platform data and lifted client interaction by 20 percent.
  • Cut deployment time by 80 percent and built the Looker Studio dashboards behind stakeholder reporting.

Mar 2024 to Apr 2024

London, remote

Full Stack Developer, Cantos Cautivos

A short internship on a PHP full-stack codebase.

Mar 2020 to Mar 2023

India

Founder, Build My Site

A web development agency, founded and run solo alongside a degree.

Education

Sep 2023 to Aug 2024

MSc Advanced Computer Science, Newcastle UniversityDistinction

Information security and cryptography, secure software development, system security, engineering for AI, cloud computing. Dissertation on LLM-driven identification of job intent, technologies and teams.

Jun 2020 to Jun 2023

BCA Computer Science, Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research7.68 GPA

Vice President of the student council and cultural club. Orator's club, college magazine.

Writing

Advancing Chat Security: Asymmetric Encryption for Scalable Web Applications. Written alongside the end-to-end encrypted chat project.

Everything else

  • 2026
    wayfinderBuildingGuided space exploration for Samsung Galaxy XR, built on real Mars and Moon terrain. 72 fps on device.
    Unity 6, OpenXR, C#
  • 2026
    rust-pair-teachBuildingA VS Code tutor for Rust that refuses to write your code and gives tiered hints instead.
    TypeScript, VS Code API
  • 2024
    end-to-end-encrypted-chatShippedAsymmetric key management with private keys held on device. Written up as a paper on scalable chat encryption.
    Vite, Firebase, WebCrypto
  • 2026
    spark-streaming-job-marketLambda architecture over live job postings, hot path to Redis and cold path to Parquet.
    PySpark, Kafka, Redis
  • 2026
    fact-check-proShippedA packaged agent skill for verifying claims against sources, with a report linter.
    Markdown, Python