Rahul Thathoo

Lead engineering strategy for Square’s global growth charter, owning end-to-end acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, monetization, and international expansion.

• Lead a 120+ person global growth engineering organization responsible for seller acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, monetization, and international expansion. Delivered impact that significantly exceeded our annual growth targets, driving a meaningful uplift on a multi-billion-dollar volume baseline and reaccelerating company-wide performance.
• Partnered with Product to transform Growth into a high-velocity, engineering-led operating system, resulting in a multi-point year-over-year acceleration across key funnel metrics and a materially stronger inbound flywheel.
• Recruited and developed a new generation of EMs calibrated for growth engineering, creating a culture of speed, ownership, autonomy, and business-first thinking, where engineers routinely originate, validate, and ship product ideas with measurable impact.
• Hands-on technical leader: dive into architecture reviews, code, demos, QA, and GTM details; build early prototypes myself when needed; and consistently clear organizational blockers to accelerate launches across regions and product lines.
• Championed major customer experience improvements, from resolving high-friction onboarding and account-related flows to streamlining feedback loops, and drove consolidation of data and experimentation infrastructure projected to deliver seven-figure operational efficiencies.
• Raised cross-functional execution standards by providing candid, outcomes-oriented feedback to Design, PM, and Eng; pushed for tighter MVP definitions; improved velocity through automation; and enabled teams to operate with urgency, clarity, and accountability.

• Lead server engineering teams, within a highly matrixed org, that power tier 0 backend systems for Square's Food & Beverage, Services (Invoices), Health & Beauty & Retail businesses, as well as all of Onboarding. Total size of 90+.
• Additional remit includes leading a brand new pricing and packaging initiative for all of Square, working with 20+ PMs, 100+ Engineers, and 10+ Designers.
• Each individual business is well over 9 figures in revenues, with scale reaching well above 100,000+ RPS (request per second)

• Led engineering across Backend, Web, iOS, Android, and AI/ML for multiple product lines, including a consumer marketplace, a B2B POS & Scheduling platform, and a Conversational AI system.
• Scaled the org from 3 → ~100 engineers, delivered multiple 0→1 initiatives (including Square Go), and secured leadership alignment on long-range roadmaps for new product bets.
• Drove orders-of-magnitude growth in usage and revenue for our POS product and established Square Go as a major new acquisition channel bringing high-intent users into the Square ecosystem.
• Championed cross-org initiatives with durable company impact and interviewed 400+ candidates across engineering, management, PM, data science, and design to raise the talent bar.

• Built the product and engineering organization from the ground up, establishing four cross-functional teams across the US and Europe (~20 engineers), and delivered a full SaaS suite for SMBs, including Scheduling, CRM, Client Communications, and Automated Marketing.
• Designed and scaled a 0→750K MAU consumer marketplace for appointments (haircuts → yoga), generating meaningful daily revenue; led iOS and Android teams for both consumer and merchant apps.
• Delivered an award-winning mobile experience: app named Top Mobile App at Launch Mobile & Wearables, featured by Apple as “Best New App,” and praised by TechCrunch as a rare, life-changing product in the class of Uber, Pocket, and Venmo.
• Streamlined internal operations by building a Zendesk-like support tool and Twilio-powered call center; contributed to board presentations, investor meetings, and fundraising efforts.

• We went through a bunch of iterations across product categories
• We worked on social networks, daily deal products, iOS apps, & finally auction based ecommerce
• Ruby on Rails backend & frontend engineer with emphasis on running day to day operations
• IOS developer for iPhone & iPad apps
• User evangelist within the company & managed technical support with a team manning live chats, customer emails, implementing features based on user pain points

• Part of the Core Development team with the Secure Enterprise Search group, which is the industry leader in enterprise search
• Worked on enhancing product features, productising critical new features especially liked by customers (like Target, Boing, CNN, etc) and getting things done in general!
• Tried to bring in the ideas from social software on the internet to bear on development of enterprise software features
• Search within the enterprise is a tough problem and so I worked to constantly prototype new ways to improve relevancy and the search UX
• Egs, tagging for improving search relevancy, prototyped various tagging UX, browser add-ons to improve data gathering and UX, suggested content providers, etc

• Did everything from writing code, to managing cross-continental teams, to soldering partnerships with organizations (both academic and non-academic) in India, to finding new avenues for business to flourish, to negotiating acquisition terms and conditions!