www.agilecandor.com

Rahul Sawhney

Reliable software, reliable teams, reliable returns.

Practical systems for engineering leaders, software teams, and investors to scale without surprises, built from 25+ years in engineering, including 8+ at Amazon.

What I do

I lead transformations across cloud, SaaS, e-commerce, supply chain, and healthcare—improving reliability, developer velocity, compliance, and cost structure.

Who this blog is for

Engineering leaders (EM → VP) who own reliability, velocity, and outcomes
Software development teams seeking calm, predictable delivery at scale
Investors & founders focused on de-risking execution and capital efficiency

What I write about

Platform & Reliability: SLOs, observability, incident response, error budgets, capacity planning
Execution Systems: quarterly planning, dependency & risk management, roadmap credibility, KPIs/OKRs
People & Culture: hiring, coaching, performance systems, psychological safety that scales
Security & Compliance: IAM/VPC guardrails, data residency, secure-by-default mechanisms in product teams
Modernization & Migrations: strangler patterns, deprecations, idempotency, backfills, change management
Leader Toolkits: runbooks, post-mortems, decision memos, review templates, checklists you can reuse
Reliability Economics (Investor-grade): de-risking delivery, cost controls, margin-aware architecture

Expect opinionated, context-aware notes. I’ll show the trade-offs, share templates, and change my mind when better evidence wins.

Selected results

Migrated a national grocer’s ordering stack to Tier-1 microservices across 500+ stores, improving reliability for 4,000+ associates.
Modernized a 30-year supplier platform used by 25K partners, reducing OpEx 18%.
Architected a new cloud region with VPC/IAM guardrails and monitoring for 200+ services, enabling compliant migration of 500+ workloads.
Launched middleware and workforce scheduling platforms that delivered Multi-Million $+ savings over five years.
Re-platformed a global audio/media catalog to a modern stack, reaching >99% availability and doubling operational productivity.
Coached 100+ people across two continents to safely execute a large technology transformation.
Led development of medical-imaging software used by thousands of imaging modalities worldwide.

Experience includes the following:

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Connect

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rahulsawhney
Book an appointment: Schedule a call

14 Essential Software Engineering Concepts for Engineers and Managers

There are many terms and concepts that are important for an engineer to be familiar with, in order to effectively build software. This post includes some of those terms. I will continually add to or update this list. Agile. A flexible and iterative approach to software development that emphasizes collaboration, customer feedback, and adaptive planning. My experience and success with agile development was the inspiration behind starting this blog. DevOps. A set of practices and tools that improve efficiency, speed, and reliability of the product through automation and optimization of the software development and delivery process where operational efficiency is part of the development process. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD). A set of practices and tools that result in faster and more frequent releases, through automation of building, testing, and deployment of software. A key part of CI/CD is to deliver software to production frequently and using tec...

Forget Onboarding, do Alongboarding!

Alongboarding, an agile onboarding approach Alongboarding: We’re in it together! Organizations hire new people every day. A great first impression can make a tremendous difference in retaining employees. No one gets a second chance to make a great first impression, not even the best companies. An onboarding experience is an essential part of making that first impression on a new employee. Agile has been around for many years and has gained vast acceptance throughout the community. Yet, I find it disappointing that its tenets are not used well in most companies and most onboarding approaches follow a waterfall approach. Alongboarding is an agile onboarding approach that applies agile tenets to onboarding new employees and makes the experience richer and more fulfilling. When I joined AppFolio as an agile coach, I experienced this approach during my onboarding. It felt like the team owned my success as much as I owned the team's success. It was a welcome change from some of m...

Make onboarding fun with Onboarding Canvas!

The Onboarding Canvas is a tool that can be used for onboarding a new team member . We derived this tool from Spotify's adaptation of the Toyota Kata . I like this tool because no one can tell you precisely how your onboarding should be like in order for you to be effective at your new job. This is a tool for continuous reflection and adaptation. It puts the newcomer in the driver’s seat, makes the onboarding process agile through continuous collaboration with your team. Four quadrants The onboarding canvas has four quadrants: Now: It defines where the team is now, what is going on and how is the new team member adapting to the change? Definition of awesome: With the addition of the new team member, how would the team like itself to be? What would be awesome for the new team member? Next target: In order to move towards "Definition of awesome" what outcomes should be achieved in the next x weeks? Next steps: What are the immediate next steps for the team...

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