Who is Kishan Savaliya?

Kishan Savaliya is an Adobe-Certified Magento 2 and Hyvä developer who has been writing production Magento code since 2017. The short version: I'm the person merchants and agencies hire when a Magento 2.4.x store is slow, broken, mid-migration, or needs a custom module that the Marketplace can't supply.

I started my Magento journey in 2017, working on Magento 1 first and then jumping straight into Magento 2 once the 2.2.x line stabilised. By 2020 I was running my own freelance practice end-to-end — discovery, architecture, code, deployment, post-launch performance work — for stores across the US, EU, UK, Australia, and the Middle East. In September 2021 I passed the Adobe Certified Professional — Adobe Commerce Developer exam, which validates the full backend stack: dependency injection, plugins/observers, EAV, indexers, message queues, GraphQL, the REST API, and the Service Contract pattern.

I'm not an agency. There is no sales team between you and the code. If you message me on LinkedIn or via my hire me page, the same person who answers also writes the code, runs the deploy, and tunes Core Web Vitals on the live host. That structure matters more than people expect — it's the reason small bug fixes ship the same day instead of "next sprint", and the reason quotes come back in hours instead of weeks.

I live in Ahmedabad, India, but the practice is global. Roughly 80% of the stores I work on are based in North America or Europe. I keep evening hours that overlap with US Eastern and UK working time, and I'm comfortable on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Loom, and old-fashioned email. I write in plain English, document changes in Markdown, and leave PRs that the next developer can actually read.

Adobe certification and credentials

The Adobe Certified Professional — Adobe Commerce Developer credential is the entry-tier certification that Adobe issues for Magento 2 backend development. I passed it in September 2021. The exam covers PHP 8.x, Magento's module system, EAV, the search and indexing stack, dependency injection, plugins, observers, the API layer, and basic frontend integration. It is the certification that most Adobe Commerce partner agencies require for their lead developers, and it's the one most independent Magento freelancers do not actually hold.

That certification matters for three reasons. First, it's verifiable — Adobe maintains the registry on Credly and the credential cannot be faked. Second, it forces you to understand the patterns Magento expects you to use (Service Contracts, repositories, the dependency container, area code separation) rather than the patterns that "work" but make every future upgrade painful. Third, it's a hard filter for Adobe Commerce projects, where merchants on the Enterprise plan increasingly ask for Adobe-certified developers on the build team.

Beyond Adobe certification I maintain a long-running reputation across the public Magento developer communities. My account on Magento Stack Exchange has been active since 2017 with several hundred answers across the EAV, layout, frontend, and admin domains. My Stack Overflow profile covers the wider PHP and JavaScript ecosystem. The GitHub account hosts the open-source mage2kishan/module-* family along with smaller utilities and recipe gists.

On the freelance side, my Upwork profile carries Top-Rated status with a long-running Job Success Score. I keep the JSS visible rather than hiding behind a logo wall — for an independent developer, the public reputation IS the portfolio.

Magento + Hyvä expertise stack

I work the full stack a Magento store actually runs on. On the backend that means Magento 2.4.4 through 2.4.9, PHP 8.1 through 8.4, Composer, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis (cache and sessions), OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, Varnish, and the underlying nginx + PHP-FPM hosting layer. On the frontend that means the Luma theme, the Hyvä theme, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Knockout.js (for legacy customer-data work), GraphQL, and the REST API.

Hyvä gets its own paragraph because that's where most of my recent work lives. I've built and migrated Hyvä themes from Magento 2.4.4 onward, including stores with heavy third-party module footprints that needed custom Hyvä-compat layers. The Hyvä theme development service page covers the full menu of what that looks like — fresh builds, Luma-to-Hyvä migrations, Hyvä-React Checkout integration, and post-launch Core Web Vitals tuning. For merchants weighing the move, the Luma to Hyvä migration playbook documents the actual sequencing I follow.

I also work the SEO surface — XML sitemaps, hreflang, structured data, robots policy, IndexNow, image SEO, and the AEO/GEO surface that increasingly matters for AI search. That work is documented in long-form on the LCP / INP / CLS recipe and the TTFB optimization case study.

Open-source work — the Panth module family

The open-source side of my practice runs under the mage2kishan GitHub organisation, using the Panth\* PHP namespace and the Panth_* Magento module convention. The family covers the gaps I kept hitting on client builds — places where the Marketplace listings were either expensive, abandoned, or solving the wrong shape of the problem.

Modules in active use include Panth_AdvancedSeo (per-page SEO controls and resolved-meta cache), Panth_StructuredData (JSON-LD schema for Product, Article, Organization, FAQ, Breadcrumb), Panth_Hreflang (multi-store hreflang generation), Panth_HtmlSitemap and Panth_XmlSitemap (sitemap generation that scales past the core limits), Panth_RobotsSeo, Panth_LlmsTxt (the new llms.txt and llms-full.txt standard for AI crawlers), Panth_FilterSeo (faceted-navigation SEO controls), Panth_ImageSeo, Panth_SocialMeta, Panth_IndexNow, and Panth_Crosslinks.

I also maintain non-SEO modules — Panth_ErrorMonitor for production error capture, Panth_RegistrationGuard for signup spam defence, Panth_WisePay for Wise transfer payments, Panth_HeroSlider, Panth_Blog, Panth_Faq, and a handful of utility modules used internally. The full list and install instructions live on the GitHub profile.

Open-source matters here for a practical reason. When a client hires me to extend Magento, the work I ship looks and reads like the work I publish in public. The patterns are the same, the namespace is the same, the testing approach is the same. There's nothing hidden behind an NDA-only "private framework" — what you see in the public repos is what you get on the build.

How I work with clients

The engagement model is intentionally simple. There are three default shapes: a fixed-fee audit, a fixed-fee sprint, or an hourly engagement.

The $499 audit is a one-week deep dive — I take a fresh clone of your store, run it through Lighthouse / WebPageTest / k6, read the custom code, profile the database, walk the cron stack, and ship back a written report with a prioritised remediation list. The audit is intentionally cheap because it's also how I qualify the work; if the audit shows there's no real problem, I'll tell you and you've spent $499 to find out, which is far less than the price of a wrong build.

The $2,499 sprint is a two-week implementation block where I pick the highest-impact items from the audit (or from your own backlog) and ship them. Most sprints close out with measurable Core Web Vitals improvements, a clean repo, a deploy script, and a one-page write-up that your in-house team can use to keep the wins.

The hourly engagement runs at a flat $25/hr against scoped tasks. Every quote shows the breakdown as ~Nh @ $25/hr so you can sanity-check it. No rate cards, no "senior vs principal" pricing games, no minimum retainer. If you'd rather start informal, the hire me page covers the intake form and the calendar link.

Communication is async-first. I default to Slack, Notion, GitHub Issues, or whatever your team already uses. I write Loom walkthroughs for anything that needs a 5-minute explanation. I keep a public commit history on every project so you can see exactly what changed and when.

On the deployment side, I default to a clean three-environment workflow — local Docker, a staging clone, and production — with every change reviewed via pull request before the deploy script runs. For clients on Adobe Commerce Cloud the workflow maps onto the platform's integration, staging, and production branches. For self-hosted Magento I keep a deploy script in the repo so the same release process works on any host. Database migrations run through setup:upgrade; static content deploys are explicit, not implicit; cache and full-page cache flushes are documented so the on-call developer (you, your team, or me) knows what to expect.

For long-term engagements I keep a per-client log — a Markdown file in the repo that tracks every meaningful change, every infra decision, and every known gotcha. That log is what makes the "developer changed every 6 months" problem manageable. The next person on the project (in-house, agency, or me returning after a break) can read it and pick up the work without re-discovering the same edge cases.

Speaking, community and writing

Most of my community work happens in writing rather than on stages. The long-form Luma to Hyvä walkthrough, the Core Web Vitals recipe, and the TTFB case study are the highest-traffic pieces. They're written for working developers, not for executives — code samples, real numbers, no marketing veneer. I publish under my own byline and link the canonical version on each platform so attribution stays clean.

On the Q&A side, the Magento Stack Exchange profile is the most public record of the community work. The questions answered there are the questions other Magento developers actually ask — layout XML edge cases, EAV joins, indexer races, cron deadlocks, the kind of thing that doesn't get a marketing page. I also reply to Magento questions on the wider Stack Overflow profile when they cross over into the PHP, JavaScript, or DevOps surface.

On social, I post short technical notes on X / Twitter and longer career updates on LinkedIn. Both accounts are real — same person writing, no ghostwriters, no growth-hack threads.

A note on writing style: I try to write the kind of post I'd want to read when I'm debugging at 2am. Real numbers, code that runs, the exact error string Google needs to find the answer, and an honest "this doesn't always work" caveat at the end. Most of the blog posts on this site started life as private notes to myself while solving the problem for a client; cleaning them up and publishing them is the way I close the loop. If a piece I've written has helped you ship something — or saved you from shipping something broken — I'd rather hear about that than collect another vanity metric.

How to get in touch

The fastest way to reach me is the hire me page, which routes to whichever channel suits you — short-form intake, calendar booking, or direct email. For Upwork-managed projects, the Upwork profile handles contracts and payments. For quick one-message questions, WhatsApp at +91 84012 70422 usually replies same-day during Indian working hours plus the evening overlap.

What I'll ask for on the first message: a sentence or two about the store, the Magento edition (Open Source vs Adobe Commerce vs Cloud), the current theme (Luma, Hyvä, custom PWA), and the shape of the work — bug fix, performance, migration, custom module, ongoing maintenance. I usually reply within a working day with a yes/no and, if yes, a rough estimate as ~Nh @ $25/hr or one of the fixed-fee scaffolds.

If you want to read more before reaching out, the Hyvä developer profile, the Magento developer in India page, and the Magento performance optimization service page all cover specific service angles in more depth.

Frequently asked questions

When was Kishan Savaliya Adobe-certified?

September 2021. The credential is Adobe Certified Professional — Adobe Commerce Developer, issued by Adobe and verifiable on Credly. I do not list any other year and do not have a separate "expert" or "master" tier credential — that's the certification I hold.

How long have you been working with Magento?

Since 2017. I started on Magento 1, moved to Magento 2 during the 2.2.x line, and have been working full-time on Magento 2 ever since. The store you're reading this on runs Magento 2.4.9 with a Hyvä theme.

Are you a freelancer or an agency?

Independent freelancer. There is no agency, no team of subcontractors, no account managers. The same person who quotes the work also writes the code and runs the deploy. If a project is too large for one developer I'll tell you up front and recommend a partner agency rather than overcommit.

Where are you based and what hours do you work?

Ahmedabad, India (IST, UTC+5:30). I keep evening hours that overlap with US Eastern business time and full-day overlap with the UK / EU. Most clients are based in North America and Europe.

What's your hourly rate?

Flat $25/hr on hourly engagements, with fixed-fee scaffolds at $499 for a one-week audit and $2,499 for a two-week sprint. Every quote is shown as ~Nh @ $25/hr so the breakdown is transparent.

Do you have an Upwork profile I can verify?

Yes — upwork.com/freelancers/~016dd1767321100e21. The profile carries Top-Rated status and the Job Success Score is visible publicly. Upwork is a fine route for clients who prefer Upwork-managed contracts and escrow.

What's the Panth_* namespace I see in your code?

That's my open-source module family. The packages live under the mage2kishan GitHub organisation and use the Panth\* PHP namespace + the Panth_* Magento module convention. Examples: Panth_AdvancedSeo, Panth_StructuredData, Panth_Hreflang, Panth_LlmsTxt. Both client work and public modules use the same patterns.

Do you work on Adobe Commerce Cloud, not just Magento Open Source?

Yes. The Adobe certification is the Adobe Commerce Developer credential, which covers both editions. I've shipped on Adobe Commerce Cloud (the managed offering), Adobe Commerce on-prem, and Magento Open Source self-hosted on VPS / dedicated hardware.

Can you sign an NDA?

Yes — standard mutual NDA is fine, I'll sign it before the kickoff. For sensitive engagements I keep client codebases on encrypted drives, use separate SSH keys per client, and rotate credentials at project close. If you need a specific NDA template (BAA, EU-style DPA, etc.), send it across and I'll review.

What's the fastest way to start a conversation?

The hire me page is the single intake. It routes to email, calendar, or WhatsApp depending on what suits you. Same person replies either way — usually within a working day.