Prayag Dave

Founding Engineer at Cruit

I'm the founding engineer at Cruit, where I own the product end to end: backend, web and the app.

I've helped products reach millions of users and kept systems steady under real load, where being reliable matters as much as being fast. I like working close to the business end of engineering: what to build, why it matters, and whether it's actually working.

I care about how a product looks and feels as much as how well it runs.

Find me on , or grab my resume.

Contributions

@daveprayag

2,570 in the last year

Experience

- Founding engineer, owning the product end to end: backend, web and the app.
- Designed and led a ground-up redesign of the app, from a 59-screen prototype to a full rollout on iOS and Android. It now holds a 4.1-star rating, with retention up 35% and crashes and bugs down 52%.
- Re-architected the app's build. Expo SDK 54 on the New Architecture and a purge of dead dependencies took it from ~170 MB to 45 MB, and cached builds cut Android from 24 to 10–12 minutes and iOS from 16–17 to 8–9.
- Built the over-the-air release pipeline: staged channels, one-command rollback, forced updates and crash reports mapped back to source. 20+ production releases have shipped through it since February, with no app store review in the way.
- Rebuilt the authentication pipeline for multi-tenancy and SSO. Auth was once our noisiest source of problems; it now runs at effectively zero issues.
- Reworked identity so one person can belong to several companies, and traced duplicate accounts to racing sync webhooks: 4,677 duplicates cleaned up, with unique indexes so they can't come back.
- Migrated the Greenhouse integration to OAuth ahead of its API shutdown, staged behind a kill switch, and built the RecruitNow integration against ~150k applications.
- Built the AI behind our interview product: LLM agents that pull structured candidate profiles, and a dynamic prompt system that evaluates technical interviews and code.
- Mostly the first call for database architecture and the system design behind new features.
- Founding engineer here means working directly with the founders. I think business first and let the engineering follow, so what ships moves the company, not just the codebase.
joincruit.com
- Cut dashboard API latency on Lufina by 64%, p90 from 7.2s to 2.6s, through aggregation pipeline work and strategic indexing.
- Engineered a decentralized wallet and crypto payment infrastructure: native and ERC20 transfers across Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Polygon.
- Designed and maintained 58% of all APIs as the leading backend engineer, holding most to a 670ms p90 across 1.2M+ users and 8K+ daily actives.
qonsultbusinesssolution.com
- Built a CRM from the ground up with customer management, employee tracking, analytics and ticketing. It trimmed operations by 40% and carried 40+ interactions a day.
- Put a live project through black-box and systematic testing, surfacing and fixing 15+ critical issues. Bug reports fell 60% and the product got noticeably smoother to use.