Jul 2020 – Jan 2021 · 6 mos · Greater London, England, United Kingdom

• Tessian is an exciting London startup building advanced ML algorithms to prevent cybersecurity threats.
• I helped build an engineering management program, started a data platform initiative, and helped address scaling challenges at Tessian.

Jan 2016 – Jul 2020 · 4 yrs 6 mos · Greater Chennai Area

• Led the AI initiative (Freddy) of the company, which has launched multiple ML features for the customer support product Freshdesk.
• Prior to this, led engineering teams for Freshsales, a new-age CRM for high-velocity sales teams, and data platform. Founded the data platform team and set up the first Big Data stack at Freshworks, that helped democratise data access and enabled data backed decision making.

Sep 2011 – Dec 2015 · 4 yrs 3 mos · Bangalore, India

• Chatimity started as a social chat application aimed at helping people discover others based on location and interests. It grew to over 3 million users across various platforms. We built a lot of chat tech and employed ML and AI solutions like a social reputation system for automated community moderation and spam detection. We built a cool chatbot, named MITI, that answered users' questions, conducted games and trivia, and used a large AIML corpus to conduct casual chat.
• Later, we carved out the chat tech into a platform catering to business use cases like sales and support and built chatbots specialized in verticals like travel and e-commerce. This led to an acquisition by Freshdesk (now Freshworks), a leading SaaS provider of sales and support products. The acquisition was completed by January 2016. Acquisition announcement: https://www.freshworks.com/press-release/freshdesk-acquires-chatimity/

Apr 2006 – May 2011 · 5 yrs 1 mo · Bangalore, India

• At Google, I worked on two search projects in technical lead capacity and multiple projects as an individual contributor.
• I worked on a music search project built using typical Google search tech initially indexing music from Indian providers like Saregama, Saavn and In.co music. This was launched at google.co.in/music (launch announcement: https://india.googleblog.com/2010/10/introducing-google-music-search-india.html) and ran for about two years before being merged into Android music. I was the technical lead on the project with two engineers and was responsible for technical design, implementation, and scaling. I shouldered the responsibility of coordinating with music labels, which turned out to be a whole different learning experience.
• Before this, I was the technical lead on one of the first social search projects in Google. This surfaced results from friends and friends-of-friends from Orkut in Google search. For example - for queries like [goa trip] and [goa photos]. Representing items associated with a social network graph in a search index and ranking them was a technically challenging problem and first in-depth learning experience for me in Google search infrastructure and search relevance and ranking.
• As an Individual contributor, I built and launched Google Hot Trends for India that shows trending queries in last hour, day or year.
• I also built and launched Finance Onebox for India that surfaces finance chart and quotes in response to stock market queries on Google. This involved building data pipelines, data cleansing, and relevance tuning.
• At various times, I was also involved in several other projects and side (20 percent) projects in the areas of Google AdWords, data center management, and maps.

Sep 2004 – Mar 2006 · 1 yr 6 mos · Bangalore, India

• As part of Server Technologies Group, worked on Enterprise Manager product, contributing to the upgrade wizard for Oracle 11g release.

Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 · 1 yr · Gurugram, Haryana, India

• Had to return to India for family reasons and took up an assignment with Nagarro, which was a vibrant fast-growing services startup. I helped on a few tech-heavy projects and learnt how a services firm is run.

Jan 2001 – Jan 2002 · 1 yr

• One of the early engineers at Tavant. For a fresher, there could not have been a faster learning opportunity. I helped build a time-based transaction platform used to power rental businesses like heavy equipment rental enterprises. Worked on inventory and catalog management. Got the first taste of search and relevance building search system using AltaVista SDK. Wrote a great deal of code and experienced the vibrant atmosphere of an early stage Valley startup.

Jan 2000 – Jan 2001 · 1 yr

• Hired off IIT campus for this Silicon Valley startup building a time-based transaction engine, mainly for rentals. While we waited for a US visa, we joined an Indian arm here (Quadrant Infotech India Pvt Ltd). Later in 2001, we shifted to Tavant Technologies, a newly created subsidiary of Tavant Technologies, Inc.