Joel Alenchery

Revamped frontend coding interview process for the AI-assisted development era, shifting focus from "can they write code" to "can they explain and architect code," training senior engineers on the new methodology. Led 20+ interviews resulting in 5 senior hires, while simultaneously training the team on the new assessment methodology.

Established a "One Team" culture by developing strong design-engineering partnerships through regular sync meetings, actively listening to design team pain points and prioritizing design-led initiatives that improved collaboration.

Conducted comprehensive stakeholder interviews and developer surveys to identify organizational gaps, synthesizing findings into clear presentations for leadership and actionable roadmaps.

Workshopped and defined the team's vision and mission with stakeholders, creating clarity around purpose and building organizational alignment.

Navigated complex organizational dynamics to build consensus on technical approaches, including hybrid solutions that balanced speed-to-market with quality requirements.

Operationalized platform quality by building canary release workflows and observability scripts, providing the data needed to make transparent, defensible platform decisions.

Led technical execution on critical infrastructure, including a complete design token overhaul. Proved the architectural viability and wrote automated migration scripts that resolved ~80% of breaking changes for downstream teams.

Delivered high-stakes product requirements by collaborating with the Portal team to design and build AAA-compliant components, meeting stringent government accessibility standards.

Evaluated, integrated, and bundled third-party product tour libraries with pluggable adapter architecture.

Founded and scaled the UI Platform team, establishing its vision, mission, and culture while recruiting 4 talented engineers (3 senior, 1 junior).

Identified and prioritized engineering pain points through platform-wide surveys and stakeholder interviews, creating data-driven roadmaps aligned with both developer experience and business goals.

Led the standardization of frontend-to-backend communication by developing a unified HTTP library, centralizing authentication, logging, and monitoring while reducing onboarding time for new engineers.

Orchestrated a complex, organization-wide migration from Material UI v4 to v5, implementing a bridge solution that allowed gradual upgrades without disrupting product development.

Designed and built an observability dashboard tracking migration progress, enabling teams to identify specific areas needing attention with exact file locations and line numbers.

Established a cross-team task force of volunteer engineers to drive the component library migration, reducing completion time from an estimated 18 months to 6-8 months.

Partnered with design leadership to implement design tokens and create automated workflows from Figma to production code, eliminating manual color and typography updates.

Led the development of Forto's first comprehensive design system for the customer-facing Ship application, dramatically reducing development time and design-engineering handoff friction.

Modernized the frontend build system by upgrading from Webpack to Vite, reducing cold start times from 90+ seconds to under 1 second and cutting hot module replacement times to near-instant.

Initiated and managed the "Pixel to Product" newsletter to improve cross-functional communication about platform changes and upcoming improvements.

Products that I helped build from the ground up:

Voicereach: A sales conversation enabler with an SLA to provide 8X boost in productivity

RightLeads: A proprietary lead discovery engine using machine learning to find and score relevant leads in an ever-growing database focusing on IT security

Main responsibilities included design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve software inside an agile development framework. Manage individual project priorities, deadlines and deliverables. Mentor and grow a team of 5 software engineers

Worked closely with customers to understand opportunities where technology can be used to drive business efficiently and effectively

Early adopters of a single-page app in AngularJS leveraging WebRTC to implement VoIP in browser.

Studied user behavior to optimize role-based user experience leveraging material design

Studied B2B marketing practices and designed closed-loop marketing strategy and successfully implement the ideas into the VoiceReach product

Designed a highly reactive, stateful, web-socket based real-time UI to enable browser-based VoIP capabilities

Involved in implementing distributed VoIP backend with Freeswitch and Twilio

Feature & technical design for resilient REST-based microservices in NodeJS

Technical design of horizontally scalable and highly available data store using Riak DB

UI and backend to deliver a fast intuitive way to build complex search queries over a large data set of contacts to deliver a seamless contact list build experience.

Technical design of a git like structure to keep track of data as it evolved and changed in a NoSQL data store

Design and implementation of scalable distributed file processing pipeline to enable processing and ingestion of large data files (100k to 10M records) using only Google Cloud Platform services

Understood the inner workings of a Javascript DICOM viewer. Helped with solving bugs and implementing new features in web annotations.

Part of the design team building a roadmap for rewriting the medical imaging application using ASP.net MVC 4.0

Developed competitor analysis platform to analyze and report current prices and routes being offered by other players in the low-cost flights market. The system was built using phantom.js to write web scrapers that ran at specified intervals to scrape competitor websites to discover and report back with prices for programmed routes.

Developed a low latency, highly available web feed to be consumed by a travel metasearch engine. This helped with exposing our client’s products to more customers.

Designed and implemented the booking module for a travel website with integrations to popular third-party travel booking supplier web services like ABCBeds, GlobeTravel, TuricoHolidays, LowCostBeds, Hotels4U, HolidayTeamFlight, HolidayTaxi, HolidayBrokers etc to provide full itinerary building capabilities

Integrated the travel website with a payment gateway to enable safe and secure online payments.

Lead development of a UK based travel website in ASP.net and Sitefinity CMS but without using standard heavy asp.net controls. Instead, a pseudo SPA was built using plain HTML and JavaScript relegating ASP.net to only render the initial page and serve as the REST API afterwards. This was before the popularity of ASP.net MVC

Designed a multi-threaded module to fetch and generate a deals table using data from multiple web sources. This was combined with weather information and other details to form a comparative grid showcasing the best time in a year to visit a given destination.

Wrote a technology demonstrator by modifying the hardware abstraction layer of the Symbian Location-Based Services subsystem to work on a production phone (Sony Ericson M600i) with a Bluetooth GPS device instead of an integrated GPS chip.

Worked with the Bluetooth subsystems team to understand the Bluetooth stack being used in Symbian OS

Designed and implemented automation scripts in Perl which parse XML files generated by Enterprise Architect. These files contained sequence diagrams and the script compressed the diagram to hide internal complexities of the LBS subsystem before it is shipped as documentation to customers

Absorbed into the company after an internship with them for 6 months.

Developed a web-based MIS software with graphical data analysis tools to manage multiple restaurants.

Designed and developed a recipe planner for restaurants that enabled chefs to perform costing of recipes based on ingredient quantities and keep an inventory of stock.