
Tathagat Thapliyal
I build engineering teams and frontend systems that scale - spent years doing it at some of India's most demanding product companies.
Currently heading frontend engineering at Simbian AI, where I'm building the UI layer for security infrastructure designed for the agentic era. That means shipping fast, maintaining zero tolerance for performance debt, and making complex security workflows feel intuitive, all at the same time. I led the full migration from Django to React, cut load times by 83%, and introduced AI-native development workflows across the engineering team.
Before Simbian, I led web engineering at CRED, owning frontend delivery across multiple pods, scaling CRED Garage from 2M to 10M+ customers, and building platform systems that other teams depended on.
I'm as invested in the team as I am in the code. I mentor engineers toward ownership, not just task completion. I've created courses, spoken at conferences, and consistently tried to give back to the community that shaped me.
What drives me: systems that last, teams that own their work, and products that actually solve hard problems.
Interests:
performancereact queryadvancedtypescriptdesign systemsreact componentsjavascriptstate managementcomponent librarycode qualityweb componentsanimationsweb developmentmicroservicescssreact hooksfullstackframeworksgithub actionsmicro-frontendsproductivitygraphqlbrowser apicss-in-jsuser interfaceswebpackweb appsfrontendmonoreposnpmsvelteauthenticationreact 18api developmenttypescript librariesstorybookbuilders and foundershtmlreact
Scaling React : What Actually Matters
React Summit 2026
Upcoming
Scaling React : What Actually Matters

React often gets blamed when applications feel sluggish."We need to migrate."
"We need a new framework."
"React can’t handle scale."
But what if React isn’t the problem?
In this talk, we’ll challenge one of the most common assumptions in frontend engineering: that the framework is responsible for poor performance. Through real-world production patterns and architectural examples, we’ll uncover what actually breaks as applications scale - and why most performance issues stem from our decisions, not React itself.
We’ll explore how over-rendering, global state misuse, network waterfalls, third-party script bloat, and poorly applied SSR strategies quietly degrade performance long before React becomes a bottleneck.
This session is not about micro-optimizing hooks.
It’s about thinking like a frontend architect.
"We need a new framework."
"React can’t handle scale."
But what if React isn’t the problem?
In this talk, we’ll challenge one of the most common assumptions in frontend engineering: that the framework is responsible for poor performance. Through real-world production patterns and architectural examples, we’ll uncover what actually breaks as applications scale - and why most performance issues stem from our decisions, not React itself.
We’ll explore how over-rendering, global state misuse, network waterfalls, third-party script bloat, and poorly applied SSR strategies quietly degrade performance long before React becomes a bottleneck.
This session is not about micro-optimizing hooks.
It’s about thinking like a frontend architect.