Aviral Gupta

08.2026 to present

guptaaviral.com

Self-directed build, during a career break, open to new opportunities

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Learning something new, then building something substantial with it. This site is the current build: Next.js 16 in English and German, server rendered, with an agent readable surface for LLM clients.

• Built the site so an AI assistant can read it as easily as a person can: every page also exists as plain text, with a machine readable index of the whole site, so an assistant answers questions about my work from the source rather than from scraped HTML.
• Automated checks run on every push. A missing translation, a page description too long for search results, or a claim my CV does not support fails the run, and nothing goes live until it is fixed.

01.2024 to 07.2026

Thrifty Car Rental UAE

Senior Developer

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Ran the web platforms for Dollar, Thrifty and Cariva in a team of five under the Head of E-commerce. Also set and reviewed the work of an outside development agency of five people.

• Designed the six Node.js microservices that replaced Dollar's .NET backend and went on to serve all three brands, and wrote the bulk of that backend. Boundaries drawn on who owns the data and how often it changes: Branch, Product, Content, User, Pricing and Booking. Deployed on Cloud Run behind an API gateway, with an API key path for the public front end and JWT for the internal ERP, so a key lifted from a browser cannot reach an administrative endpoint.
• Integrated payments through N-Genius, Adyen, Bank of Muscat and PointsPay, behind one resolver rather than a branch per brand. The gateways a brand may reach are configured per environment, so a brand cannot reach a gateway it is not configured for.
• Made payment confirmation idempotent, because at least once delivery is the contract a provider actually offers whatever the documentation implies. A duplicate webhook returns 200 with no side effect, and two concurrent deliveries are resolved by an upsert whose filter carries the status condition, so the database decides the winner rather than the application.
• Kept pricing as its own service so a bulk ingest running three to ten minutes could never slow a booking, with price resolved per request from the day the booking is made, the day the car is collected, the duration and the business rules on top.
• Built a lead and abandoned booking recovery module on the data layer, turning drop-offs and failed payments into event cards the business teams work from.
• Cut the response time of a vehicle listing endpoint that was running at 3 to 7 seconds, working through a compound index first, then the query shape, then caching. New Relic was where the endpoint was traced and where each change was measured before and after.
• Migrated Thrifty's PHP Laravel monolith to Next.js with no ranking loss and no downtime, on a complete URL inventory and a redirect map tested one to one.
• Built Cariva, a UAE car sales and used-car platform, from an empty repository: a Next.js front end with SSR and ISR chosen per page type, and 326 templated pages generated from the data model.
• Shipped an OCR driving licence onboarding flow built on Google Gemini into a revenue critical path.
• Owned technical SEO, Core Web Vitals and the measurement stack across the three brands and the 858 pages now live: 532 on Thrifty, 326 on Cariva. GA4 with a custom ecommerce event taxonomy, GTM, Meta Pixel with Conversions API and deduplication, and Consent Mode v2 for GDPR and UAE PDPL. Replaced a landing page hero of 1MB served at one size to every device with three AVIF renditions under 200KB behind a CDN.

10.2023 to 12.2023

Grid Dynamics

Software Engineer

India

A client engagement with Google on a connected device platform: data packet handling, image upload and processing, and data integrity.

03.2022 to 09.2023

Mercedes-Benz R&D India

Consultant

India

ISTDaWo, a platform of more than thirty microservices collecting vehicle data from automated feeds and from manual entry across several departments, then putting it through a staged approval process that checks integrity before the data is used for certification and marketing.

• Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, Kafka and RabbitMQ. Worked ticket by ticket on services already running in production, including the Kafka path that carried bulk vehicle datasets to consumers processing them at their own pace.

06.2017 to 11.2021

SIKA Interplant

Senior Engineer

India

Aerospace and defence. Built an internal online estimating tool, and managed international clients across order intake, technical questions and shipping.

10.2016 to 04.2017

OSSPL

Trainee Engineer

India

Worked on the design of mechanical equipment including furnaces, scrubbers and cyclones.

08.2010 to 05.2015

Lovely Professional University

B.Tech (Hons) and M.Tech, dual degree

Punjab, India