Zerodha

I'm interning at Zerodha from January to May 2026 (four months). Zerodha is India's largest stock broker — a 30-person tech team handling a $10B+ valued company, with daily trading volume of over ₹20,000 crore passing through their systems. They don't typically take tech interns — I reached out cold and they made an exception.

What I'm Working On

India Stack internals, internal tools, some networking and access control infrastructure.

The Tech Stack

See zerodha.tech/stack for the full list. The highlights:

• Go for most backend services
• PostgreSQL for data storage
• No Kubernetes, no microservices sprawl — just straightforward, well-designed systems

This simplicity is intentional. When you're handling financial transactions at scale, complexity is the enemy. The team has built one of the most reliable trading platforms in India with a fraction of the engineering headcount you'd expect.

Why It Matters

Zerodha processes a significant portion of India's retail trading volume. The systems I'm working on touch real money and real regulatory requirements. There's no room for "move fast and break things" — the code needs to be correct, and the systems need to stay up.

Learnings

Simple scales. The team's philosophy (documented extensively on zerodha.tech) is that boring, battle-tested technologies beat "cool" ones. No Kubernetes, no microservices sprawl — just straightforward, well-designed systems. RDBMS works for 97% of problems. Reduce networked dependencies. The bottleneck is almost always the database, not your choice of framework.

User disengagement over engagement. Zerodha has a deliberate philosophy of not chasing engagement metrics or employing dark patterns. No marketing spam, no "re-engagement" notifications, no gimmicks. The thesis: if your product is genuinely useful, users will come and stay of their own volition. This shapes everything from product decisions to how the tech team thinks about features.

Small teams with clear ownership ship faster. A 30-person tech team with minimal bureaucracy outperforms much larger organizations. When you're not fighting organizational complexity, you can focus on building things that matter.