About the Founder

Nish Sowdri

Founder & Fractional CTO, FIKA

The missing piece to complete your masterpiece.

~20 yrs building software Funded startup founder $2M+/month in transactions 3 countries 6+ verticals

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The Story

From deep
systems to the
founder's seat

An unusual path — and the reason FIKA can sit on your side of the table.

Nish started in deep systems — building email servers in C++ and telecom systems where reliability and milliseconds matter. Over close to twenty years he grew from systems engineering into architecture, product and design, and then founded his own company.

That path is unusual — most technologists go deep in one lane. Nish is an architect, product thinker, designer and full-stack engineer in one: he designed a business-intelligence platform from scratch, architected fintech systems handling real money, and ships products people use daily. As a funded startup founder he runs systems processing millions of dollars in transactions every month — so he understands the founder's seat, not just the engineer's.

Today he brings that to non-technical founders as a fractional CTO, with a current focus on AI and agentic systems — including voice-based AI ordering and agent-driven product development.

Flagship Discipline

Architecture —
The Core Discipline

Architecture is the decision layer that determines whether a product scales gracefully or buckles the moment it succeeds. It's Nish's primary craft, and the reason FIKA sits on the founder's side as the technical authority.

N-tier Architecture

For monolithic applications — layered separation of concerns at scale

Service-Oriented Architecture

For distributed systems — composable services with clear contracts

Microservices

For discrete processes — Spring Cloud, Netflix OSS

Diagram-Driven Design

Enterprise Integration Patterns — architecture as communication

Relational Schema Design

Entity-relationship modelling for transactional systems

Multi-Dimensional Modelling

ETL and data warehousing — turning raw data into decisions

RESTful API Design

For third-party integration — clean, versioned, predictable

OO Analysis & Design

UML, sequence diagrams — precision before a line of code

What Nish Brings as Your CTO

Depth where it counts

Three standing fortes that shape how FIKA operates as your technical partner.

Databases — a standing forte

Rigorous 3NF normalisation and deep experience across relational and document stores — PostgreSQL, AlloyDB, Cloud Spanner, DynamoDB, Firestore, MongoDB. The schema is the foundation of any product, and FIKA always owns it.

Security awareness, built in

From the systems-engineering years, not bolted on. Understanding threats at the infrastructure level means FIKA designs products that are resilient from the first sprint, not patched after a breach.

Product & UX — a genuine eye

A real feel for interface and experience. He's designed his own products end to end, not just coded them. Good product sense is rare in a CTO; here it's a core part of the offering.

Domains worked across

The spread
is the message

Pattern recognition across industries is the edge — no single-vertical playbook.

Aviation Ad tech Food tech Business intelligence Telecom Finance / Fintech Invoice processing

Technology

The toolbox

Languages, platforms and tools Nish works in directly — not managed from a distance.

Languages

Rust C++ Go Java JS / TS

Frontend

React UI/UX Design

Backend

Node.js Java

Cloud

Google Cloud AWS

Databases

PostgreSQL AlloyDB Cloud Spanner DynamoDB Firestore MongoDB

Agentic systems Voice AI Agent harnesses

Selected Work

A few things built

All client work stays anonymised — no names, no logos.

Designed and built a business-intelligence platform end to end

Architected a raffle / fintech platform for the Australian market

Built invoice-processing systems for Australian operations

Created a voice-based AI ordering system for a food-tech business

Built an agentic website-development product

Engineered high-throughput email servers in C++ in telecom

nish@fikacto — tech-audit — zsh — 80×24

nish@fikacto ~ $

The Diagnostic Mind

The first call is already an audit.

Before any engagement begins, Nish is already pattern-matching. Fifteen years of building and reviewing systems across industries means the common failure modes surface fast — and so do the fixes.

Your offshore team is busy, but not aligned. Velocity without direction compounds technical debt — Nish spots this inside the first sprint review.

You're about to sign a dev quote you can't evaluate. Scope inflation, vague milestones, and missing SLAs are easy to miss if you haven't seen hundreds of proposals.

You get a plain-language decision brief, not a lecture. Every technical finding is translated into a founder-facing recommendation — what it means, what it costs, what to do next.

Across Three Continents

Global standards,
local context

Worked with London-headquartered companies, built extensively in Bangalore, and consulted in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney — global engineering standards with genuine local context for Australian founders.

London Bangalore Adelaide Melbourne Sydney

20 Years building

6 Industries

3 Continents

30min To clarity

Getting Started

Let's talk about what you're building.

30 minutes. No pitch. A straight conversation about your product and where you're stuck technically.

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