// SCOPE: WORDMARK + SITE + SYSTEM
Case study: why all of this ships on Cloudflare ->
SUBJECT / 01
35.6762N // 77.5946E
Nikhil Ballal.
Hiring engineers & designers for a decade, now he is building with them.
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01/WORK
Four surfaces, one operating system for hospitality.
Live
app.ediblefactor.com/login
// PLATFORM: iOS + ANDROID + WEB
Case study: the storage pivot that cut read latency by an order of magnitude ->
// SHIPPED: 4 OUTLETS, 15 DISHES, 0 PAGER DUTY
Case study: sold to its first restaurant over a rooftop demo on two bars of 4G ->
// 20 YR TALENT LEADER, STATIC ASTRO BUILD
Partners
NINAN'S
Steakhouse
02/TRAJECTORY
A decade of finding the people who build the future, then building it with them.
Nikhil spent nearly a decade inside the engine room of tech hiring. At Arctic Wolf he was the partner senior engineering leaders called when a role had been open for three quarters. At Proximity Works he was the first talent hire, the one who set the bar for everyone who walked through the door after him.
He learned, slowly and then all at once, that the best builders kept describing the same software that did not exist. So in 2025 he stopped looking for the people to build it and started building it himself. Edible Factor and Plate are the first two pieces.
He still picks up calls about hiring. Mostly though, he ships.
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Stealth Startup 2025 / PRESENT
Builder, CEO & Founder
- Built and shipped Edible Factor for diners at app.ediblefactor.com
- Built Plate, the operating system for restaurants
- Customer calls in the evenings, ships in the mornings
- Shipped a portfolio for a 20 year talent leader at gautamshetty.me
- Treats the product, the pitch, and the press release as one craft
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Arctic Wolf 2024 / 2025
Talent Acquisition Partner
- Owned Strategic TA across cybersecurity engineering
- Ran employer branding for the India org
- Built the bench for SOC, detection, and platform teams
- Closed the roles hiring managers said could not be closed
- Partnered with senior leadership on org design and headcount
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Proximity Works 2023 / 2024
Founding TA Specialist
- First talent hire, set the bar for everyone who came after
- Designed the end to end TA system from scratch
- Hired across engineering, design, and product
- Calibrated hiring managers from chaos to consistency
- Wrote the playbook the rest of the org still uses
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upGrad Enterprise 2021 / 2023
Recruitment Consultant L3, Tech & Digital Transformation
- Closed senior engineering leaders for digital transformation programs
- Specialised in BFSI and enterprise SaaS hiring
- Ran retained search alongside contingent
- Trained junior consultants on consultative recruiting
- Built repeatable rituals for intake, calibration, and offer close
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upGrad Enterprise 2020 / 2021
Recruitment Consultant L2, Tech Hiring
- Pure play tech recruitment across full stack and platform engineering
- Built sourcing pipelines from scratch
- First 25 hires of his career
- Learned that a great intake call is worth ten great sourcers
- Earned the L3 promotion in under a year
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Bonito Designs EARLIER
TA Intern, Content Writer
- TA Intern, learned the craft of talent
- Remote content writer, learned the craft of words
- Realised both crafts are the same: matching truth to need
- Got hooked on the feeling of shipping work people actually use
03/ON SCREEN
Worked the other side of the camera, too.
Also fronted big-budget traditional media: a national trampoline-park TVC, a leading cellular network campaign, and the Samsung Galaxy launch shoot at the Opera House on Brigade Road for the Korean investor reveal.
04/CONNECT
// AFTER HOURS
Champion, in another timeline. →
04/WRITING
Notes from the battlefield.
- I closed my first client on two bars of 4G on a rooftop. The deck was elegant, but it stayed in a tab. The selling happened in the conversation.
- I don't think I'm a pioneer. But. Two months ago I changed every product's font. A month later YouTube Music followed. Then Anthropic. Coincidence? Probably.
- Innovation from necessity. I built Co-Director for myself. A few weeks later it had become a business conversation.
- I moved from Netlify to Vercel to Cloudflare. Here is why Cloudflare won. An honest reading of three platforms across three products. Cloudflare did not feel like a deploy platform.