Scaler Pod - The Software Engineer's Podcast · Scaler Academy

SCALER POD 14 - Rahul Chari, Founder & CTO, PhonePe | UPI & India's Digital Payments Revolution

·1 hr 29 min·5 clips

PhonePe was born from the belief that solving payments infrastructure would make India digital.

Rahul frames his role as two jobs at once. He is founder on one side and CTO on the other. He says he likes to start early because the first half of the day is less chaotic. Morning usually begins with coffee or tea and a long read through the Confluence pages his team has written. That reading helps him stay current on what is happening across the platform. After 11, the day turns into reviews, design discussions, and other platform work. The conversation then moves into how PhonePay thinks about scale. Rahul explains that the company wanted different services to scale according to their own needs. A peer-to-peer system, a recharge flow, and a bill payment flow do not all demand the same kind of capacity. That led PhonePay toward a shared-nothing architecture. He is clear about the tradeoff. The internal system becomes very chatty, but the flexibility is worth it. Rahul also talks candidly about his own strengths and gaps. He is stronger on backend systems and distributed data stores than on mobile engineering. That matters because the mobile app often has to do a lot of transformation and orchestration around the APIs it calls. PhonePay therefore built a store-forward model. The app is not treated like a dumb client. It carries real frontend and backend responsibilities, with core stack layers and application logic of its own. Over time, the company has tried to add more composite backend layers so the load on the app is lower. The closing turn looks toward AI, conversational interfaces, and personalization as ways to make product discovery feel more natural and less like telemarketing.

As heard by us

A steady systems piece about scaling PhonePe without treating mobile as an afterthought.

Rahul Chari reads as both founder and CTO, and the most useful moments are the practical ones: the early start, the stack of Confluence pages, and the review-heavy back half of the day.

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Why you'd press play

See how a founder-CTO actually spends a day at PhonePay.

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