How Twitter Rebuilt Payments and Scaled Its Billing Team
Dwaraknath Bakshi on taking over a team, improving advertiser billing and building the subscription engine behind Twitter Blue.
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A payments system is also a customer experience. When an advertiser wants to keep a successful campaign running, the processes around budgets and billing can matter as much as the ad itself.
In this conversation with Savan Vyas, Dwaraknath Bakshi describes his work on Twitter’s payments infrastructure, the transition into engineering management, and the team’s effort to remove friction from advertiser spending.
How did the leadership journey begin?
Around 14:49 in the interview, Dwaraknath explains that he joined as a staff software engineer working on a payments revamp. His team covered advertiser onboarding, billing and payments. When the team faced a leadership gap, a director asked him to take on engineering-management responsibilities.
He emphasises the support he received from mentors and colleagues. This was a team effort, rather than a story of one person rebuilding everything alone.
What changed when he became a manager?
Around 15:52, the discussion turns to moving beyond people-pleasing. Dwaraknath describes learning that a leader cannot make everyone happy and still meet the needs of the team.
His account includes bringing in fresh talent and engineers who took ownership of difficult problems. The useful question for a new manager is how to make decisions for the team while getting help from experienced people around them.
Where did advertisers experience friction?
Around 17:43, Dwaraknath explains the advertiser-onboarding and spending process. He uses a hypothetical campaign during the Super Bowl to illustrate a practical problem: a successful advertisement might need more budget quickly, but the process of changing an insertion order could take too long.
By the time the required conversations and approvals were finished, the opportunity to reach the audience might already have passed. His example shows why an engineering problem should be understood through the customer’s timing and goals.
What did the team change?
Around 19:22, he describes work on dynamic credit lines and other ways to reduce spending friction. He credits his product partner for the ideas and describes the engineering work as part of a broader effort involving multiple points of friction, including invoicing.
The takeaway is to identify where a real customer journey gets interrupted, then address those obstacles one at a time. The interview does not present a universal billing architecture or a complete technical implementation guide.
How did Twitter Blue fit into the payments work?
Around 20:30, Dwaraknath explains that his contribution to Twitter Blue was on the payments side. The team built a subscription platform, working with Stripe, to support the subscription engine.
This distinction matters: the broader product involved many contributors, while his account describes the payments and subscription responsibilities of his team.
Watch the focused clip
Start with How Twitter Rebuilt Payments and Scaled Its Billing Team, a six-minute excerpt, or watch the full interview above for the wider conversation.
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These notes are an edited summary of the published interview, with approximate timestamps to help you find the discussion. They are not a verbatim transcript.