Manuj Grover
Backend Engineer
Focused on making large systems cheaper and faster.
Currently an SDE 3 at Zomato, where I own services that handle over 0 requests at that pace since you opened this pageAt that pace: about 86 billion a day, roughly ten for every person on Earth. requests a minute - so if a delivery partner found your order quickly, some of that was me. I occasionally talk about this on stage - most recently at FOSS United Delhi, on how Zomato uses OSRM to compute distances and durations at scale, and I’m told I’m fairly good at making the graphs go the right way - good enough that Zomato handed me a 🏆 Founders’ Award for Great Outcome Champion. Off the clock, I’m usually reading: 19 books so far this year, and an unbounded number of articles.
Work
- Jan 2026 — Now SDE III at Zomato
- Taught our systems to spot delivery partners riding on the wrong side of the road. Those orders fell 42%, and the roads got a little calmer.
- Automated the reshuffling of geo-entities, the invisible lines on our delivery map. Nobody redraws them by hand anymore, and it saves ₹25L a month.
- Dreamt up Circles and Return-to-Home. Partners now stay logged in 12% longer and sit idle 3% less; turns out everyone likes a ride home.
- Jul 2024 — Dec 2025 SDE II at Zomato
- Turned a rule engine that needed 500 tasks into a library that runs on 3. Same rules, far fewer machines to babysit.
- Talked DynamoDB down from $3,000 a day to $500. It took the news surprisingly well.
- Put the Leaves library on a diet: ~40% leaner, with p99 latency down 39%.
- Shipped Quick Delivery, MRO, Collections and, most importantly, Pre-Order Cakes.
- Nov 2022 — Jun 2024 SDE at Zomato
- Built three services that peaked at over 16 million requests a minute between them, and kept a straight face doing it.
- Moved the important data from MySQL to DynamoDB, and the storage bill shrank 18%.
- Ran tech for the OTG pod while the business grew 34%. Correlation or causation, I’ll take either.
- Made distance calculations 50% more accurate, so the distance we charge for finally matches the road.