Oitihjya Sen
Backend engineer · formerly a lawyer · India
After graduating from Hidayatullah National Law University in 2018, I began my career as a corporate lawyer: first on ICICI Bank’s corporate legal team, then as a Research Fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, India’s leading legal think tank. At Vidhi I worked on insolvency and bankruptcy reform. The policy paper I co-authored on pre-packaged insolvency was incorporated into the IBC (Amendment) Act, 2021.
In the middle of the pandemic, in 2021, I decided I wanted to become a software engineer. I taught myself the fundamentals of programming (shoutout to freeCodeCamp), built several projects in public — a Lisp interpreter, a URL shortener, a Twitter bot — and wrote more than 40 posts documenting the journey.
In early 2022 I attended the Recurse Center in New York, a programmers’ retreat, where I first picked up Clojure.
I joined Helpshift in May 2022 as a backend engineer, where I work primarily in Clojure on distributed, event-driven systems.
In November 2025 I gave a talk, LegalArgumentException: From Courtrooms to Clojure, at Clojure/conj in Charlotte, NC, tracing my path from law to software.
Clojure/conj 2025 · Charlotte, NC
Given my legal background, I’m drawn to the interface of law and technology. To that end, I’m currently building Slate, an LLM-powered legal petition analyser.
If you’re working on something interesting, come from a non-traditional background like mine, or are just curious — feel free to reach out at contact@otee.dev.