India’s Scale Demands Planning For Failures Beyond Your Stack: Razorpay’s Prabhu Ram

Building reliable digital payments at India’s scale requires planning for failures in infrastructure a company does not control, according to Razorpay’s SVP of engineering Prabhu Ram.

Speaking at Inc42’s inaugural ‘The CTO Summit 2026’, Ram said companies must assume that disruptions can originate both within their own systems and in the underlying technology operated by other players.

“But in the case of any of us here, we don’t own all seven layers,” Ram said. “You have to build systems assuming that not just the layers that you control may break but also the underlying layers that you don’t control may break.”

Ram was speaking during ‘The Architecture Of 10X: Engineering For India’s Next Scale Curve’, a panel moderated by Jesper Ludolph, general partner at Exfinity Venture Partners. Other speakers included Kuku cofounder and CTO Vikas Goyal, BookMyShow’s Noel Curtis, and Oracle’s Palanivel Saravanan.

Contrasting this dependence on external infrastructure with greater control over the technology stack, Ram pointed to Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon as examples of companies that have brought critical components in-house.

“If you own the entire seven layers of that cake, it makes it a lot easier because you control the entire supply chain,” he said.

The challenge becomes particularly significant when consumers expect digital services to “just work”, whether they are making a UPI payment or booking a ticket online. Companies must meet those expectations while keeping response times within milliseconds or a few seconds, depending on the task.

The discussion also touched on AI’s role in engineering. Oracle’s Saravanan highlighted how companies are bringing AI models closer to their data to improve responses to users.

“Everybody is looking at how they can get the models much closer to their data, so that the model can learn better and respond to the user better.”

Ram, meanwhile, cautioned that AI cannot compensate for weak engineering foundations and can compound problems when deployed without adequate observability — the ability to monitor what is happening inside a system and identify what has gone wrong.

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