Inside Meesho’s Kafka rethink: How an internal ‘mQ’ layer is powering AI-scale commerce

What does it take to build data infrastructure for Bharat—not just at scale, but under constraint?

At a recent Confluent event in Mumbai, Meesho’s Senior Architect Shubham Sharma pulled back the curtain on a reality rarely discussed in glossy architecture diagrams: scale is only half the problem. The other half is unpredictability—of networks, devices, user behavior, and economics.

For Meesho, where a majority of users come from tier 2 and tier 3 India, engineering is shaped as much by constraints as by ambition. Low-end devices, patchy connectivity, and price-sensitive users mean that performance isn’t a luxury metric—it’s a business imperative.

“Even an extra byte or a few milliseconds can impact conversion,” Shubham said.

Building for Bharat, not just for scale

Meesho’s platform today operates at a staggering magnitude: processing petabytes of data daily and trillions of inferences, while handling nearly ...