Written references.

I am writing to provide a reference for Hiren Bhikadiya, who has been engaged by Gradia Ltd as a Senior Full Stack Engineer since August 2025. I am the founder of Gradia and have worked with Hiren directly throughout the engagement, so I can speak to his work with confidence.

Gradia is a rewards platform for verified UK university students, and Hiren has been central to building it. He led the delivery of our Partner Portal MVP from technical specification through to production, and his work has extended across the wider platform: partner onboarding, student facing APIs, affiliate and rewards systems, database design and the supporting infrastructure on Supabase and Vercel. This is a real production system handling live users, payments logic and personal data, and Hiren has built and maintained it to a consistently high standard.

Three things stand out from working with him. First, the quality of his engineering. His code, migrations and documentation have always been kept in a state that another engineer could pick up at any point, which is a discipline many developers talk about and few maintain. Second, his reliability. Working fully remotely, he provided clear weekly progress updates, attended every agreed check in, and delivered consistently against milestones across a demanding roadmap. Third, his care with data. He has worked within strict data protection requirements, including row level security and least privilege access, and treated student and partner data with the seriousness it deserves.

Hiren is professional, communicative and easy to work with. He takes ownership of problems rather than waiting to be directed, and he has been trusted with significant responsibility across our stack as a result. I would gladly work with him again, and I am happy to recommend him without reservation to any future client or employer.

13 August 2026 · Contactable on request

I am writing to recommend Hiren, who worked with us for approximately four months as a developer on Basile, our B2B people-search and company data platform.

Hiren built the platform for us essentially end to end, and what stood out from the very beginning was that he did far more than execute a spec. Before writing a single line of code, he would come back with sharp, well-framed questions about the problem itself. Those conversations consistently helped me think through the project more clearly and scope it better. Having someone who challenges and refines the brief rather than simply implementing it is rare, and it made a real difference in the quality of what we shipped.

The core of the work was data management at significant scale, with a large number of interrelated datasets that had to be modeled, connected, and queried together coherently. He handled this exceptionally well, and the architecture he put in place held up as the project grew.

Two things are worth adding. First, although I did not hire him for front-end or design work, everything he produced on that side was thoughtfully considered — clean, coherent, and genuinely well designed. Second, the platform had to ship in both French and English. Hiren does not speak French, but he built a reliable AI-assisted workflow to handle the translations, and the French output was consistently flawless. That is a good illustration of how he works: he identifies a constraint and engineers his way around it rather than flagging it as a blocker.

Finally, on days when I had not loaded him up with work, he did not wait for instructions. He took the initiative to optimize existing code, write tests, and improve what was already in place. That kind of ownership is not something you can ask for; either someone has it or they doesn't.

I have nothing but positive things to say about working with Hiren. He is a strong engineer, a genuinely useful thinking partner, and someone who takes real responsibility for the product he is building. I recommend him without reservation, and I am happy to answer any questions directly.

2 September 2026 · Contactable on request