About

Anshul Bansal

Principal Engineer, Web Platform · OLX India · since Apr 2026 · Gurugram, India

I architect the PWA, SSR, edge, and performance systems that serve 12M monthly web users. I lead three PWA squads spanning www.olx.in, Akamai and CDN delivery, BFF patterns, Core Web Vitals, observability, SEO, and client-side AI.

Eleven years in, eight of them at OLX India — SE1 to Principal. Before that, HomeLane and FabHotels.

Anshul Bansal

Experience

  1. OLX India

    1. – Present

      Principal Engineer

      Leading frontend infrastructure strategy for OLX India’s web platform — PWA architecture, CDN delivery, BFF patterns, and performance engineering for 12M monthly web users.

      • Driving lightweight SSR for bot traffic to improve crawl efficiency and cut bandwidth cost
      • Optimising Listing-page LCP (mobile) toward sub-2.5s; advancing INP via JavaScript optimisation on interaction-heavy pages
      • Scaling Akamai cache hit ratio beyond 60% to unlock further infra savings
      • Setting technical direction for BFF adoption across web and Android
    2. –

      Technical Architect · Chapter Lead (Web)

      Owned the web platform chapter — frontend infrastructure, performance engineering, and delivery systems for OLX India’s PWA at ~150K rpm.

      • ~50% monthly infra cost reduction at the same traffic scale; CDN cache hit ratio ~30% → ~55–60%; 80% pod-count reduction
      • 45–50% LCP improvement on Desktop Home; 30–50% INP gains on interaction-heavy pages; CLS near zero
      • Led technical SEO to +160% daily organic clicks over 14 months; 80–99% fewer 5xx errors; performance budgets and Web Vitals gates in CI

  2. OLX

    1. –

      Lead Engineer (SE3)

      • Architecture ownership for the car-dealer Super App (React, Server-Driven UI) and the advertisement platform; mentored a cross-functional team
    2. –

      Senior Software Engineer (SE2)

      • Shipped Super App dealer workflows and monetisation surfaces on React and Server-Driven UI
    3. –

      Web Developer (SE1)

      • Micro-frontends via Web Components in the PWA; B2C and monetisation admin tools in Vue.js and React-Redux

  3. FabHotels

    1. –

      Frontend Developer

      • Mobile website features and CI/CD for mobile-web deployments

  4. HomeLane

    1. –

      Software Engineer

      • Company site and microsite in React-Redux; internal CRM (MEAN) and Node.js APIs

Platform work

Selected threads from recent years at OLX India — how the work was approached, not just the outcomes.

Edge caching and bot classification

A blanket TTL treated humans, search crawlers, and abusive bots the same — either over-caching stale inventory or under-caching and burning origin. We classified traffic at the edge and gave each class its own cache and block policy by page type. The hard part was false positives on legitimate crawlers; the tradeoff was operational complexity at Akamai in exchange for origin headroom and cleaner crawl budgets.

SEO at scale

Organic growth was capped by crawl waste: expired listings returned 404s, zero-inventory categories still got crawled, and rendering cost competed with indexable HTML. We fixed the technical foundation first — redirects, suppression, and crawl efficiency — then moved into on-page quality. Written up in two parts on tech.olx.in.

AI discoverability

Making the site legible to LLM crawlers: robots.txt Content-Signal directives, an llms.txt, and Markdown content negotiation so agents can pull structured answers without scraping the full PWA shell.

Trunk-based development with session flags

Long-lived feature branches were slowing delivery and making production risk hard to reason about. Session-scoped flags in the SSR pipeline let the team merge small changes continuously without exposing unfinished work — written up on tech.olx.in.

ReviewOwl

GitLab CI + Slack bot for automated MR reviewer assignment with load-aware round-robin, so review load stays balanced across the web chapter without manual routing.

OLX Assist

Workflow-based chat widget for help.olx.in — JS SDK embed, cookie/Bearer auth, and XMPP triggers — so support flows can sit inside the help surface without a separate app shell.

Writing

February 2025

SEO at Scale — Part 2

On-page SEO after the technical foundation: content quality, ranking signals, and the experience work behind a 160% surge in organic clicks.

Read more →

Speaking

Delivered

Your Server-Rendered App Doesn't Know Who It's Talking To

  • Dev Days Mumbai ·
  • Tech Talks @ OLX India ·

Modularising OLX's frontend monolith with Web Components

  • Naspers Global Tech Conference, Amsterdam ·

Upcoming

Other recordings

Teaching

I mentor engineers via Topmate and run internal workshops. I also ran a clean-code workshop for the intern bootcamp and organised OLX India Hackathon 2026 (~80 participants).

Leadership & communication

Side projects

2026 Health Report AI — Local-first lab-report digitiser and dashboard using Ollama vision models; no report data leaves the machine. [code]

Earlier open source

Skills

Platform

  • PWA architecture
  • SSR at scale
  • BFF patterns
  • Micro-frontends
  • Web Components
  • Server-Driven UI

Edge & performance

  • Akamai / CDN strategy
  • Caching
  • Core Web Vitals
  • SEO

Observability & more

  • New Relic / NRQL
  • Incident response
  • Capacity planning
  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • Node.js, React, Svelte, Python
  • GenAI / Ollama

Contact