Technology Uncompromised: Building The Curlec Payment Stack

This is an exclusive entry written by our Senior Software Development Engineer, Debanshu Rout, who led the engineering team that brought the Curlec Payment Gateway to life. Read on to delve deeper into his insights and expertise gained from years of hands-on experience in the field.

Technology runs through my veins

Having been in the industry for seven years, out of which three were spent building products for Curlec’s parent company, Razorpay India, I now lead the engineering team in Malaysia. Where one of my key responsibilities is to monitor and measure the health of our systems rigorously While ensuring an undisrupted payment experience for all parties. In simpler terms, it’s to ensure the technology that empowers our payment rails in India can be easily adapted to global merchants, starting with Curlec in Malaysia.

My journey with Curlec; Hello Malaysia!

When I joined the Curlec engineering team in July 2023, I found myself at the forefront of a team tasked to build a robust, secure, and efficient payment infrastructure. Which not only facilitates transactions but creates the best experience for merchants and end users alike. We started by understanding the needs of our Malaysian merchant base – how different it is from India’s. We identified pain points which helped us upgrade and customise the existing payment stack to cater to a new market.

One of our milestones was building parity in terms of the methods and instruments available for the Malaysian market. And also set up processes that comply with Bank Negara Malaysia and foster connections through our PayNet membership. The success of our payment stack wasn’t just measured in numbers but in the stories of businesses flourishing and customers enjoying a frictionless payment experience.

Products. Uncompromised. 

All Curlec products are created with one thing in mind: Ease of usage. This includes ease of usage for developers, e-commerce practitioners, and founders. When we build our APIs for merchants, we ensure that they are developer-friendly intending to integrate seamlessly, providing zero friction to start collecting payments.

As a tech-first organisation, we ensure engineering initiatives get equal importance – so we can improve our code quality, readability, performance, and more. But what sets Curlec apart? We begin by asking ourselves this one question at the start of every quarter: What does it take for a business to succeed? 

So what follows is a prioritisation process; categorising our tasks into areas from “Urgent and important” to “Not urgent and important”. That way we can focus on what matters first, building products as per expectations. We strive for small iterative releases over a big release, using feature toggles, experiments, and A/B testing. Our mantra: no code gets deployed until all the checks are passed.

Security. Uncompromised.

Security and compliance are fundamentals of a payment technology company and with Curlec, it’s no different. We treat it very seriously. Security is baked into our processes from start to finish. For example, we have a security team, whose task is to vet, run penetration testing, and identify vulnerabilities. Any exploiters are attended to immediately. Because being an engineer at heart, we measure and prioritise the health of the payment stack for errors and availability at every stage. Any anomaly is taken seriously. 

Scalability. Uncompromised.

Having experience in tuning our systems to provide high throughput at low latency meant one thing: we were ready to scale for Malaysia. How did we get there? We process transactions to the amounts of billions in India and have merchant profiles ranging from trading and ticketing to gaming. Having battle-tested for such a market, we inherited abundant of data and learnings so we can ensure our payment infrastructure is ready to manage both steady and sporadic workloads. Our technology is built to scale.

Why is Curlec ideal for engineers? 

All that said, Curlec stands as a challenging environment for engineers – to experiment, fail, improve and grow. With a strong support system to foster collaboration and achieve rapid results, a tech-first mindset will flourish here. I’ve been blessed to work with people who are not just experts in their field but who are bold and visionaries. Having access to more than 500 of these people across India and Malaysia proves what a fruitful experience creating the Curlec Payment Gateway has been.