About
I’m Vigneshwaran Elangovan, an Android Architect at Protectt.ai, where I work on runtime application security for banking and financial apps.
A decade in, most of that time has been spent in places where mobile mistakes are expensive: retail and wealth banking at DBS, cross border payments at NIUM, learning at BYJU’S, and retail at Tesco. Apps used by millions of people a day, in domains where “we’ll fix it next release” is not always an available answer.
How I work
I care most about the decisions that are hard to reverse.
Adding a feature is rarely the interesting problem. The interesting ones are constrained as much by organisation as by technology. How do you take a monolithic payments app and turn it into SDK based libraries without stopping feature work. How do you split an app into remittance, currency exchange and transfer domains so teams stop blocking each other. How do you move a hybrid banking app to native across multiple markets, and keep a shared component library honest while several apps consume it.
What I work on
- Runtime application security. Detection and response inside the app itself, and the reverse engineering side of that problem: what an attacker actually sees when they open your APK, and what that implies about where detection logic should live.
- Mobile architecture at scale. Monolith to modular and microfrontend structures, module boundaries, and migration paths that do not require a rewrite.
- SDK design. Libraries other teams build on, including dynamic two factor authentication and Google push provisioning for card payments. Public API surface as a long term commitment rather than an implementation detail.
- Performance and size. Startup time, jank, Compose migration, and dynamic feature modules to keep the Play Store footprint down.
- On device intelligence. Rule engines and recommendation that run entirely on the phone, with no server round trip.
Where I have worked
| Company | Role | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Protectt.ai | Android Architect | 2025 to present |
| Tesco | Software Development Engineer 2 | 2023 to 2025 |
| BYJU’S | Senior Software Engineer | 2022 to 2023 |
| NIUM | Senior Software Engineer | 2021 to 2022 |
| DBS Bank | Development Engineer | 2018 to 2021 |
| Tata Consultancy Services | Application Developer | 2015 to 2018 |
Google Certified Android Developer. B.E. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Sri Sairam Engineering College. The longer version is on LinkedIn.
This blog
I write about what I am actually working through, usually in more depth than a talk allows. Recent posts cover server driven RASP architecture, what large language models did to the economics of reverse engineering, and building an on device recommendation engine as an SDK.
If something here is wrong, I would genuinely like to know.
Off the clock: ARR, Nolan, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter.