UpRoar
Founder
Prashanth Bala
Founder @uproar-1 • Worked at @klout, @facebook • Studied at @carnegie-mellon-university
Founder @uproar-1 • Worked at @klout, @facebook • Studied at @carnegie-mellon-university
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Experience
Klout
Employee
Groupy
Advisor
Meta
Senior Product Manager
Supporting Measurement Platform @ Central Integrity
Engineering Manager
Led the turnaround of Messaging Commerce, a six-year-old underperforming product. The success of this product was critical to scaling an already thriving $6B+ ARR “Click to... more Message” Ads businesses.
Defined and co-presented a new APAC strategy for Messenger to VPs, grounded in direct research with small business owners in Thailand. Advocated for commerce investments beyond Payments’ legacy scope and influenced leadership to delay premature growth goals until achieving product-market fit—using data to reveal major retention gaps.
Within six months, achieved strong retention and clear PMF through close partnership with an alpha cohort of 50 sellers. Over the next six months, focused on sustainable growth, delivering a 28× increase in transaction volume and reversing the org’s reliance on short-term, monetary incentive-driven spikes with durable, high-retention performance.
Secured funding to build two engineering teams (22 engineers) to expand Messaging Commerce to Instagram in the US, launching the new product in under six months—the fastest payments product launch in org’s history.
Defined and co-presented a new APAC strategy for Messenger to VPs, grounded in direct research with small business owners in Thailand. Advocated for commerce investments beyond Payments’ legacy scope and influenced leadership to delay premature growth goals until achieving product-market fit—using data to reveal major retention gaps.
Within six months, achieved strong retention and clear PMF through close partnership with an alpha cohort of 50 sellers. Over the next six months, focused on sustainable growth, delivering a 28× increase in transaction volume and reversing the org’s reliance on short-term, monetary incentive-driven spikes with durable, high-retention performance.
Secured funding to build two engineering teams (22 engineers) to expand Messaging Commerce to Instagram in the US, launching the new product in under six months—the fastest payments product launch in org’s history.
Engineering Manager
Brought my extensive growth and data depth to found the first Growth team within the Payments & Commerce team. It was highly successful team of 8 engineers that generated... more +350M in incremental annual ads revenue for the company within a single year of funding, surpassing our stretch target of +100M ARR.
Payments engineering consisted of primarily infrastructure oriented engineers that were highly resistant to applying product and growth principles in their space. Bootstrapped a team from the ground up and built org-wide a/b testing tooling for the first time, which empowered engineers to prove the impact of their work. This drove cultural change from shipping features to building momentum behind outcomes. I was able to recruit a larger virtual team of engineers across many teams that could take on projects on our roadmap to drive revenue impact.
Produced large number of wins through a SWAT team that collaborated well with other teams and data science. Key areas of investment included helping customers re-enable ads after being falsely banned from our platform due to aggressive payments risk models, automating the sales process of identifying business to extend Meta credit lines to globally, reducing friction in paying for ads, and building external partnerships to support local payment methods across the world.
Payments engineering consisted of primarily infrastructure oriented engineers that were highly resistant to applying product and growth principles in their space. Bootstrapped a team from the ground up and built org-wide a/b testing tooling for the first time, which empowered engineers to prove the impact of their work. This drove cultural change from shipping features to building momentum behind outcomes. I was able to recruit a larger virtual team of engineers across many teams that could take on projects on our roadmap to drive revenue impact.
Produced large number of wins through a SWAT team that collaborated well with other teams and data science. Key areas of investment included helping customers re-enable ads after being falsely banned from our platform due to aggressive payments risk models, automating the sales process of identifying business to extend Meta credit lines to globally, reducing friction in paying for ads, and building external partnerships to support local payment methods across the world.
Product Manager
Instagram
Engineering Manager
Led engineering for Instagram’s Fan-Funded Monetization pillar, helping creators earn directly from fans and strengthen community connection. Oversaw products including Subscriptions,... more Gifts, and Badges on Live, as well as Creator Marketplace enabling fan-creator interactions and paid collaborations.
Later led the Brand-Funded Monetization pillar, driving products such as Performance-Based Payments, Trends Tool, Discovery API, and Creators+ Affiliate Programs—expanding creator income streams and advertiser ROI at global scale.
Later led the Brand-Funded Monetization pillar, driving products such as Performance-Based Payments, Trends Tool, Discovery API, and Creators+ Affiliate Programs—expanding creator income streams and advertiser ROI at global scale.
Engineering Manager
Instagram Creator Blockchain Experiences + Instagram Gifting (Tipping)
Instagram's first engineering presence in EMEA. Supported multiple teams and efforts for Instagram... more Creators within the blockchain space, including staff level engineers/managers. Worked across internal and external crypto partners to launch several products with strong PR cycles. Ability to Display, Mint and Purchase NFTs on Instagram from the mobile app. Led the team through several first of its kind for Meta infrastructure, integrity and media problems.
Additionally, bootstrapped a new team and product for Gifting (Tipping) Creators on Instagram that is showing strong signs of growth and product market fit.
Instagram's first engineering presence in EMEA. Supported multiple teams and efforts for Instagram... more Creators within the blockchain space, including staff level engineers/managers. Worked across internal and external crypto partners to launch several products with strong PR cycles. Ability to Display, Mint and Purchase NFTs on Instagram from the mobile app. Led the team through several first of its kind for Meta infrastructure, integrity and media problems.
Additionally, bootstrapped a new team and product for Gifting (Tipping) Creators on Instagram that is showing strong signs of growth and product market fit.
Engineering Manager
Served as Site Lead for Instagram London, helped build Instagram’s first engineering presence in EMEA and led multiple 0→1 Blockchain bets/teams for Instagram.
Partnered... more with internal and external crypto players to launch Instagram’s NFT capabilities—enabling users to display, mint, and purchase NFTs in-app. The launch drove major PR impact and pioneered new infrastructure, integrity, and media pipelines across Meta.
Bootstrapped the Instagram Gifting team, empowering fans to tip creators and fueling a new revenue stream for creators. The product achieved strong growth and clear product-market fit, leading to my subsequent role of supporting the Fan-Funded Monetization pillar, supporting 3 products: IG Subscriptions, Badges on Live and Gifts.
Partnered... more with internal and external crypto players to launch Instagram’s NFT capabilities—enabling users to display, mint, and purchase NFTs in-app. The launch drove major PR impact and pioneered new infrastructure, integrity, and media pipelines across Meta.
Bootstrapped the Instagram Gifting team, empowering fans to tip creators and fueling a new revenue stream for creators. The product achieved strong growth and clear product-market fit, leading to my subsequent role of supporting the Fan-Funded Monetization pillar, supporting 3 products: IG Subscriptions, Badges on Live and Gifts.
Senior Software Engineer
Instagram Business Presence and Mobile Ads Creation
3 years after acquisition there was intense pressure to monetize. I was hired as the founding engineer of the Instagram... more SMB effort.
Led, recruited and co-ordinated the work of 13 engineers across Business Profiles (4), Insights (3), and Ads Payments (6)—driving the 0→1 development of Instagram’s business presence, in-app ads creation and ads payments flows. Delivered the first fork of an IG account - a Business Profile, organic and ads insights and the first in-app ads product (Promote) two months ahead of schedule, helping unlock Instagram’s monetization engine.
Collaborated closely with product leadership to make several foundational technical tradeoffs that shaped the success and scalability of ads on Instagram. These early launches now power 90M+ monthly active businesses and generate $2B+ in annual revenue from the Promote product alone.
This was also Instagram’s first mobile product built entirely on Facebook’s infrastructure, due to the complex nature of ads and payments - it was not the right choice to re-build this on IG’s servers. Designed key architectural abstractions with client infrastructure and security teams, enabling broader engineering velocity across multiple orgs.
Beyond core product work, served as a technical leader and mentor across Instagram and Facebook: managed 9 interns, coached multiple intern mentor cohorts as Intern Director, conducted 75+ engineering interviews across roles, and taught several Android Bootcamp classes. Regularly supported university recruiting and external outreach, helping scale Instagram’s early engineering culture.
3 years after acquisition there was intense pressure to monetize. I was hired as the founding engineer of the Instagram... more SMB effort.
Led, recruited and co-ordinated the work of 13 engineers across Business Profiles (4), Insights (3), and Ads Payments (6)—driving the 0→1 development of Instagram’s business presence, in-app ads creation and ads payments flows. Delivered the first fork of an IG account - a Business Profile, organic and ads insights and the first in-app ads product (Promote) two months ahead of schedule, helping unlock Instagram’s monetization engine.
Collaborated closely with product leadership to make several foundational technical tradeoffs that shaped the success and scalability of ads on Instagram. These early launches now power 90M+ monthly active businesses and generate $2B+ in annual revenue from the Promote product alone.
This was also Instagram’s first mobile product built entirely on Facebook’s infrastructure, due to the complex nature of ads and payments - it was not the right choice to re-build this on IG’s servers. Designed key architectural abstractions with client infrastructure and security teams, enabling broader engineering velocity across multiple orgs.
Beyond core product work, served as a technical leader and mentor across Instagram and Facebook: managed 9 interns, coached multiple intern mentor cohorts as Intern Director, conducted 75+ engineering interviews across roles, and taught several Android Bootcamp classes. Regularly supported university recruiting and external outreach, helping scale Instagram’s early engineering culture.
Founder
Employee
Advisor
Projects
Switch to Switch to OpenID log in standard log in
A system to automatically answer questions based off a corpus of Wikipedia articles (Scala, Stanford Parser, OpenNLP, SistaNLP)
Built and used… · More components for Information Retrieval (Okapi BM25), Keyword Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, Co-Reference resolution.
Ranked 2nd out of 15 teams, including graduate student teams.
Built and used… · More components for Information Retrieval (Okapi BM25), Keyword Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, Co-Reference resolution.
Ranked 2nd out of 15 teams, including graduate student teams.
Education
About
Achievements
I’m known for combining deep technical expertise with strong product sense to drive outsized business outcomes across many domains - growth, ads, payments, and engagement. I build teams that compound impact over time by being deeply anchored in shared values of urgency, craft, hypothesis-driven learning, and relentless focus on outcomes. I invest in people through coaching/mentorship and lead by example.
Examples of outcomes:
• Founded and sold a startup from my dorm room in college.
• Tech-led Instagram’s business presence and ads from zero to now serving 90M+ businesses and generating $2B+ ARR.
• Scaled Messenger from 700M → 1.3B MAU, delivering consistent +1% engagement (sends) lifts at massive scale.
• Built a Payments Growth team that drove +$350M incremental ARR in its first year—overcoming cultural and structural resistance in an infra org.
• Revitalized Messaging Commerce across Messenger, IG Direct, and WhatsApp—achieving PMF and 28× transaction growth in a year, after six years of failed attempts.
• Turned around multiple Creator Monetization bets, leading to hockey-stick growth within six months.
I’m focused on translating these lessons into what I’m working on next.
Describe the most impressive thing you've done.
Skills
Locations