01AR
“Sells the deal he can ship.”
Aravind Reddy
Co-founder & CEO
Twelve years across BFSI platforms and product engineering at two acquired startups. Runs commercial strategy and the senior client relationships.
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ElvixIT is a privately held studio out of Hyderabad and Bengaluru. We sell senior engineering time — IT services, consulting, outsourced squads, applied AI, and a handful of our own products — and we run a structured paid internship program that's become how we recruit. Mentors and managers are the same people. The bar is the same bar. We've been profitable since year two and we have no outside investors to keep happy with quarterly growth theatre.
We wrote these on a whiteboard in 2021 and have edited them twice. They show up in hiring rubrics, project kickoffs, and quarterly retros. When something feels off about an engagement, one of these is almost always being violated — and naming which one usually fixes it inside a sprint.
Engineers, designers and AI specialists are hired by the same partners who staff your project. Tenure over throughput. Our average engineer has been here 2.6 years — long for an Indian studio.
We write the test harness, the golden set, and the failure taxonomy before the first prompt is tuned. If a behaviour isn't measurable, we don't claim it works.
Every squad ships behind a staff-plus engineer who reviews each pull request. No tickets routed through a junior queue. No surprise rotation off the account mid-quarter.
From week two, interns own real production work paired with a mentor. The bar is the same as for full-time engineers — and roughly 38% convert to offers.
Updated quarterly. Headcount excludes interns currently in cohort. Client count is engagements with at least one production deploy. Numbers below are last refreshed at the end of Q1.
Each partner owns a P&L for their practice and still writes code or runs a workshop in any given month. There is no separate sales org — the people you meet in pitch are the people you brief on Monday, and the ones you escalate to on a difficult Thursday.
Twelve years across BFSI platforms and product engineering at two acquired startups. Runs commercial strategy and the senior client relationships.
Ex-staff engineer with a decade in distributed systems and platform infra. Owns engineering standards, hiring, and the architecture review board.
PhD in ML, six years shipping retrieval and agentic systems into regulated industries. Leads the AI practice, evals discipline, and model-ops tooling.
Runs the internship program end to end — campus partnerships, structured curriculum, conversion track. Also leads people ops for full-time staff.
The two physical floors host roughly 80 engineers between them; the rest are senior specialists across five Indian cities who join squads on demand and converge at HQ once a quarter.
5th floor, Cyber Towers, Hitec City Madhapur, Hyderabad 500081
Primary engineering floor. AI lab, client war-room, and the internship cohort space.
2nd floor, 100ft Road Indiranagar, Bengaluru 560038
Product and design studio. Client-facing consulting team works out of here.
Pune · Kochi · Coimbatore Chennai · Bhubaneswar
Senior specialists who join squads on a project basis. Quarterly on-sites at HQ.
Three things make ElvixIT different from the ten-thousand-engineer service firms and the four-person agencies you've probably already heard from. None are secrets. They're just choices we've refused to walk back, even when the commercial pressure pointed the other way.
A squad at ElvixIT is between three and seven people: a tech lead, two to four engineers, optionally a designer, and an AI specialist if the work calls for one. The squad is named at proposal stage with real CVs attached, and barring resignation or medical leave, the same five faces are on the call in month six. There is no bench arbitrage, no “we'll find someone”, no last-minute swap of a senior for a junior at the same line item.
Each squad reports to one of the four partners as an escalation path. We staff for 32 productive hours per week per engineer — the other eight cover code review, internal demos, intern mentorship, and the occasional fire on a different account. Rates reflect that math; we'd rather quote honestly than burn out a team to hit a margin. The dropout rate from squads in their first six months is under 4%, which is the metric we actually watch.
We run two cohorts a year — January and July — across engineering, applied AI, and product design. Roughly 60 interns are admitted from around 4,200 applications, sourced through campus tie-ups with IIIT Hyderabad, BITS Pilani, IIT Hyderabad, NIT Warangal, and a handful of state colleges where we've seen consistent talent. Stipends start at ₹30,000 a month and step up with track record.
Weeks one and two are bootcamp: codebase walkthroughs, tooling, internal standards, an evals primer for the AI track. From week three onward, interns are paired with a senior engineer and assigned real tickets on a real client project, behind the same code-review gate everyone else clears. Pay-grade-blind reviews of pull requests are reported at the end of cohort. Roughly 38% receive full-time offers; the rest leave with a portfolio, a strong reference, and most years a placement at one of our peer companies. Our alumni network now spans 31 employers across India and Singapore.
Every pull request — interns, mids, seniors — is reviewed by someone at least one level above. Architecture decisions over a defined threshold (new service, new datastore, anything touching auth, anything LLM-facing in a regulated context) go through a weekly architecture review board chaired by the CTO. Production incidents get a written post-mortem within five working days; the document lives in a shared knowledge base that interns are required to read in their first month.
On the AI side, no model change ships without a regression run against the eval suite we authored at engagement start. We track latency, cost, and task-level accuracy on every iteration, and we'll tell you when an upgrade isn't worth it. We've walked clients off two production fine-tunes that didn't beat their RAG baseline. That conversation is part of the job — and it's the reason our retention is what it is.
Either the engagement form or the careers desk lands in front of a partner inside a day. No funnels, no qualification gates.