What we talked about
Sayan Bhattacharya is Head of Engineering at LINK and the creator of LinkToAny.com, a platform that helps businesses migrate from legacy systems to the cloud and connect their critical tools. With a decade of experience building full-stack systems across retail, supply chain, and marketplace platforms, Sayan specializes in solving the complex challenges of data migration and system integration.
Show notes
Sayan Bhattacharya has migrated over 3 billion events across retail, restaurant, and accounting systems, and the hardest part is never the technical transfer, it’s the review process that happens after. His platform LinkToAny sits at the intersection of legacy and modern systems, and he’s using AI to compress weeks of human reconciliation work down to days through a conversational agent that asks the questions a skilled analyst would.
What we covered
- LinkToAny’s core job is moving data between systems that were never designed to talk to each other: point of sale, e-commerce, accounting, CRM, loyalty, and inventory. A typical retail merchant runs five different systems, each with its own data format and validation rules, creating fragmentation that forces staff to manually reconcile records and feed data across platforms every day.
- Large-scale data migrations at LINK don’t happen in a single cutover. For a merchant running 80 stores, the team does an initial migration, gives the customer time to review and validate, then runs an incremental sync on the day before go-live to capture everything that changed in between. The process can take three to four months for large datasets.
- AI has cut that activation time from weeks to days. A file agent reads export files and intelligently identifies product structures, for example, recognizing that “Nike Red Shirt L” has a parent product, a color variant, and a size variant, without anyone mapping it manually. A chat interface then asks targeted questions, such as whether to transform a state name spelled out in full to its two-letter postal code, so humans only weigh in on the ambiguous cases.
- On distributed team management, Sayan runs a globally distributed engineering team with the CTO in Auckland, the CEO in California, support in Toronto, and engineers in India and Europe. Their solution was to eliminate most meetings, break into small pods with individual standups, and front-load every feature with a detailed planning session where the engineer writes out API contracts before a single line of code is written.
- For hiring, Sayan looks for ownership as the primary signal over technical skill alone. Out of thousands of candidates interviewed over his career, he estimates only around 5-10% made the cut, and among those hires he still found some where ownership was lacking three or four months in. His current interview process includes EQ questions to understand how a candidate responds under pressure.
- His advice on using AI in engineering teams: standardize on one tool across the whole team to maintain a single memory graph and consistent workflow, define explicit rules for what the agent can and cannot do (such as a 300-line file limit), and never allow the agent to read files containing secrets like AWS credentials, regardless of enterprise data-handling assurances.
About Sayan
Sayan Bhattacharya is Head of Engineering at LINK and the builder behind LinkToAny.com, a data integration and migration platform serving retail, restaurant, and accounting sectors. He has spent a decade building full-stack systems across retail, supply chain, and marketplace platforms and leads a small globally distributed engineering team focused on leverage over headcount.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinnker14
Episode 144 of the PreVetted Podcast.