I've been speaking with Rajiv Lodhia, a Senior Full Stack Developer currently working at VivaCity Labs, where he's been contributing to smart cities and transport technology products. With eight years of industry experience behind him, Rajiv comes across as a thoughtful, technically rigorous engineer who clearly takes pride in the quality of his work. He's someone who gives considered answers rather than rehearsed ones, and I came away from our conversation with a strong sense that he genuinely cares about the impact of the software he builds.

Rajiv's career has been focused on full stack development across complex, data-heavy domains, and his time at VivaCity Labs has given him real exposure to the challenges of building reliable software at scale in the transport and smart cities space. The achievement that stood out most to me was his complete rewrite of a React application that had been suffering from severe performance issues. He told me he brought the initial load time down from over thirty seconds to under one second, all while keeping regressions to a minimum. That kind of result, delivered carefully and without breaking existing functionality, speaks to both his technical ability and his engineering discipline.

On the technical side, Rajiv works across a stack of TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Go and Kubernetes, which gives him genuine breadth without sacrificing depth. He's comfortable on the frontend and the backend, and the performance work he described tells me he understands not just how to build features but how to diagnose and resolve fundamental architectural problems. Day to day he's operating at a senior level, which from our conversation means he's not just executing tasks but thinking about design decisions, trade-offs and the longer-term health of the codebase.

In terms of motivation, Rajiv is open about wanting to find a role where he can take on greater technical ownership and work on problems with real-world consequences, which fits well with the kind of engineering-led environments I tend to work with. He's based in Rochester and is happy with either a hybrid arrangement or a fully remote position within the UK. I wasn't able to confirm his notice period at this stage, so that's worth clarifying directly with him. Overall, I think Rajiv is a strong candidate and I'd be glad to put him forward for roles where frontend performance, full stack maturity and domain complexity are all priorities.