About

I'm Kushan Shah, CTPO at Fynd, an AI-native unified commerce platform powering 20,000+ stores across 30 countries. I lead engineering and product for the platform that brands use to build websites, sell on marketplaces, modernize retail stores, and automate operations using AI.

What I'm focused on

My work spans three layers of the commerce stack:

• Commerce infrastructure at scale: the unified platform that connects online storefronts, marketplaces, wholesale, and physical retail into a single system. The hard problem is making 20,000+ stores across 30 countries behave as one coherent operation.
• Supply chain and manufacturing systems: warehouse management, transportation, and an end-to-end fashion manufacturing platform that connects brands with factories. This is where the physical world meets software, and where most abstractions break.
• AI-native retail intelligence: assortment planning for fashion and grocery, AI-powered product photography, catalog enrichment, and customer data platforms. The common thread is building AI that works for retail's specific complexity, not generic ML ported from other domains.

Across all of these, I spend a lot of time thinking about how AI changes the way enterprise software itself gets built, deployed, and operated. That's what most of my writing is about.

How I got here

I joined Fynd over a decade ago as Engineer #2. What started as a small team building commerce infrastructure grew into a platform powering 20,000+ stores across 30 countries. I grew with it: from writing the early code to leading engineering and product as CTPO. Most of what I write about comes from building the same platform for over ten years and watching every layer of it evolve.

Why I write

Most AI writing comes from two camps: researchers publishing papers, and commentators summarizing those papers. Very few people write from the practitioner's perspective: the messy middle where you're trying to make AI work inside real constraints, real organizations, and real deadlines.

That's the gap I'm trying to fill. Everything I write here is drawn from direct experience: what I tried, what broke, and what I learned. The "build log" format isn't a stylistic choice, it's an honesty constraint.

Beyond work

I'm a close follower of Indian macro: digital infrastructure, geopolitics, energy, and the structural forces shaping where the country is headed. I plan to write about this more under the "India in Transition" pillar.

I read widely, travel when I can, and follow the Premier League with more emotional investment than is probably rational.

I also build personal tools and Claude skills, which I publish as open source when they're generalizable enough to be useful.

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is on X/Twitter, LinkedIn, or GitHub. I read every message, though I may be slow to reply during sprint weeks.