Mohit Shrivastava logoMOHIT SHRIVASTAVAtechnology leader · builder · operatormohit@portfolio ~/career↓ download-cv
TERMINAL · mohit@portfolio ~/career
mohit@portfolio ~/career › git checkout media
Media platforms

Technology that moves reach, revenue and reliability.

For newsrooms, publishers and content businesses where traffic, search visibility, editorial speed, ad behavior and cloud cost all matter at the same time.

8.5M+
monthly users
one of Malaysia's most-read
5.2s→1.3s
load time
+184%
organic growth
the mandate was only stability
RM45–60K→RM12–15K
cloud bill / month
≈ −75%
22%
profit · 2025
industry good year: 2–4%
Let's talk →↓ download cv
why me, for this
$ cat media.md

This is my sharpest current fit. As Head of Technology at Free Malaysia Today I own a national news platform end to end — frontend, CMS, database, CDN, video and the operations underneath — at 8.5M+ monthly-user scale. Media platforms are unforgiving: a slow page or a missing section during a breaking story isn't a bug ticket, it's lost reach and lost revenue, live.

The work that defines this lane: recovering FMT from an SEO and stability crisis into 184% organic growth with load times down from 5.2s to 1.3s; building a CMS-decoupled GraphQL gateway that took article reads from ~700ms to under 10ms by cutting WordPress out of the read path; and a YouTube-native video CMS running 33K+ videos and 2M+ daily views for RM0 a month. All while cutting the infrastructure bill by ~75%.

What makes media different is that the platform serves two masters — readers and the newsroom. I've learned to make Google's crawlers, the cache layer, the database and a round-the-clock newsroom all work as one system, and to explain every technical decision in terms of reach and revenue.

the turnaround, in one diff
$ diff fmt-platform: Oct 2023 → today
-A platform fighting for its future — with the clock running
-Traffic and search visibility declining after a rough migration
-Database at 50–100% — site sections vanish during traffic spikes
-5.2s page loads · weak Core Web Vitals · SEO foundations missing
-RM45–60K/month cloud bill
+22% profit in 2025 — in an industry where 2–4% is a good year
+8.5M+ monthly users · 184% organic growth
+Database at ~30% — stable through breaking news
+1.3s loads · green Core Web Vitals · Google News publisher status
+RM12–15K/month — RM400K+ a year back in the budget
the business outcome

From survival mode to a 22% profit year.

When I took the platform on, the mandate was survival — stop the decline, keep the site standing. The side effect of a healthy platform was growth: more reach, more active users, more page views, at a fraction of the cost. The result is the number every media boardroom understands: in an industry where a profitable year means 2–4%, Free Malaysia Today closed 2025 at ~22% profit.

Malaysian media — a good year2–4%
FMT — 2025, platform rebuilt22%
problems I've already solved
“Traffic has been sliding since the migration.”
Rebuilt the SEO layer as an engineering system — structured data, metadata, URL behavior, Core Web Vitals, cache-aware rendering.
→ 184% organic growth · Google News publisher status
“The site dies exactly when the story breaks.”
Database surgery (queries, indexes, connections) plus a Cloudflare strategy designed with the rendering layer, not against it.
→ DB load 50–100% → ~30% · 97% cache hit · stable under spikes
“The CMS is the bottleneck for everything.”
Built a CMS-decoupled GraphQL gateway that reads MySQL replicas directly — WordPress stays for editors, leaves the hot path.
→ ~700ms → <10ms reads · zero frontend changes
“Video costs money instead of making it.”
Built a YouTube-native video CMS — treat the world's best video CDN as infrastructure instead of buying an enterprise vendor.
→ RM0/month · ~RM500K/yr avoided · 2M+ daily views
“The cloud bill grows faster than the audience.”
Treat the bill as an engineering metric: cache discipline, query repair, right-sizing, vendor reduction — while growing traffic.
→ RM45–60K → RM12–15K/month cloud bill, within the same tenure as 184% growth
“Editorial and IT are always at war.”
Reliability, editorial tooling and AI-assisted workflows for the newsroom — technology that serves the desk, not the other way around.
→ A newsroom publishing around the clock, uninterrupted
first 90 days on your platform
Days 1–30
Read the system
Full audit before opinions: traffic and search visibility, Core Web Vitals, cache hit rates, database load, cloud spend, SEO foundations, editorial pain points. I leave with numbers, not impressions — and you get the findings in business language.
Days 31–60
The quick wins
The fixes that move metrics fast and carry no downtime risk: cache strategy, query repair, Core Web Vitals, metadata and schema. At FMT this phase alone changed the load-time and stability story.
Days 61–90
The 12-month roadmap
Platform independence, video strategy, AI in the newsroom, cost baseline — a technology plan tied to reach and revenue, with the business case attached to every line.
signals
Turnaround, not greenfield
Inherited a declining national platform live, and turned it into a growth story without downtime.
SEO as engineering
Structured data, Core Web Vitals, cache-aware rendering — visibility treated as a systems problem.
Cost discipline
RM45–60K → RM12–15K/month cloud bill while traffic grew. The bill is an engineering metric.
Editorial empathy
Tooling and reliability for a newsroom that publishes around the clock.
Video at platform scale
33K+ videos and 2M+ daily views served for RM0/month — video as a channel, not a cost center.
AI in the newsroom
Rolled out AI-assisted workflows across departments at FMT — practical enablement, not slideware.
case studies on this branch
~/career › git log --branch=media
a1b2c3dCMS-Decoupled GraphQL GatewayA standalone GraphQL service that reads straight from MySQL replicas and bypasses WordPress entirely — turning ~700ms, error-prone article fetches into sub-10ms reads, without changing a single frontend query.~700ms → <10ms · 503s eliminated · 0 FE changesmediac4d5e6fFMT Platform TransformationLed the recovery of a live national news platform out of an SEO, stability and database crisis into a faster, cache-aware publishing system — across Next.js, Cloudflare, database optimization, SEO foundations, security and newsroom operations.8.5M users · 184% growth · 22% profit '25mediae5f6a7bYouTube-native Video CMSBuilt a production-grade, YouTube-native Video CMS that manages 33K+ videos and serves 2M+ daily views for RM0/month — replacing a ~RM500K/year enterprise-video vendor path by treating YouTube as the database.RM0/mo · ~RM500K avoided · 2M/day · 97% cache hitmedia
related projectsfull archive →
Free Malaysia Todayfeatured
FMT · 2023–present · Team
National bilingual news platform at 8.5M+ users — modernized end to end.
Next.jsGraphQLCloudflareGCPKubernetesMySQL
CMS-Decoupled GraphQL Gatewayfeatured
FMT · 2025 · Solo
Reads straight from MySQL replicas, bypassing WordPress — ~700ms → <10ms.
Node.jsTypeScriptgraphql-yogaMySQLCloud Run
YouTube-native Video CMSfeatured
FMT · 2025 · Solo
33K+ videos, 2M+ daily views, RM0/month — YouTube as the database.
Next.jsMongoDBCloudflareYouTube APIWebSub
stack on this branch
Next.jsReactTypeScriptWordPress / headless CMSGraphQLCloudflareMySQLMongoDBGCPKubernetes
● Available — serving notice · open to interviews now

Hiring for a media or content platform?

If the traffic, the speed or the cloud bill is going the wrong way — I've already fixed all three, at national scale, at the same time.

Let's talk on WhatsApp →↓ Download CV