Piyush Kumar — VP of Engineering

{ "AMPED": [ "Agentic AI", "Marketing", "Personalization", “Evaluation”, "Data" ] } About ~/Piyush: Hacker‑architect and open‑source evangelist with 19+ years of experience scaling India’s largest travel and commerce platforms at (MakeMyTrip, AHPL, NexTag, Droom). I specialize in building large-scale, high-performance systems, cloud-native platforms, and modern data products. At MakeMyTrip, I’ve tackled some of the most complex challenges in India’s online travel space—developing data-driven services for personalization, context-aware mobile experiences, customer segmentation, drop-off retargeting, and behavioral offer communication pipelines. Key Highlights: • Build the core for DevOps, InfoSec, Data Platform & Data Science teams at MakeMyTrip from ground zero! • Setting up co-location IDCs with Active-Active DR sites for India’s No. 1 OTA • Developing Data Products on Big Data Analytics Platforms Core Focus Areas: * AI and Agentic AI Workflows * Personalization at scale (hyper-personalization, user context modeling & Marketing Tech stack) * Data Platforms, Streaming Infrastructure * AI Evaluation Frameworks and Observability * Travel Planning AI Agents • …Generation G: Gamification engineer, building systems & creating teams Led MakeMyTrip’s strategic initiatives in personalization and recommendations, powered by robust data services and a modern Big Data platform. Also, an active member of FOSS communities in Delhi/NCR & Bangalore and has been actively speaking in various events like ET Martech, GEN‑AI Conclave, Devopsdays, OSSCamps, PyCon etc.including TEDx 🏅 IDC CIO100 ‘AWS Special Award’ (2024) – Recognized among India’s top 100 tech leaders for architecting MakeMyTrip’s cloud-native data platform and GenAI stack. 🏆 Databricks Data + AI World Tour ‘Disruptive Innovation’ Award (2023) – Honored for pioneering a Lakehouse-driven approach to hyper-personalized, “travel-smarter” customer journeys. Always a hacker at heart—constantly solving problems and experimenting with emerging technologies. Let’s connect. If you’re building the future of travel, agentic workflows, or hyper-personalized customer experiences—or just want to riff on big data, Agentic AI, and open-source—drop me a note.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Data Engineering and AI Solutions expert in the Travel industry.

Location: Gurgaon, Haryana, India

Experience: 19 yrs 7 mos

Skills

Data Engineering
Machine Learning
Big Data Analytics
Big Data
Mobile Development

Career Highlights

Architected cloud-native data platform at MakeMyTrip.
Pioneered Lakehouse-driven approach for hyper-personalization.
Recognized among India's top tech leaders in 2024.

Work Experience

MakeMyTrip

VP, Head Data Platform Engineering & Personalization (10 yrs 2 mos)

Advisor HealthCare

Co Founder (8 mos)

Droom Technology

Senior Director- Engineering (6 mos)

MakeMyTrip

Senior Manager - Data Systems (6 mos)

Manager - Website Operations (5 yrs 6 mos)

Nextag

Quality Engineer (2 yrs 2 mos)

Education

B.Tech at Himachal Pradesh University

at Kendriya Vidyalaya

Piyush Kumar

VP of Engineering

Gurgaon, Haryana, India19 yrs 7 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

Architected cloud-native data platform at MakeMyTrip.
Pioneered Lakehouse-driven approach for hyper-personalization.
Recognized among India's top tech leaders in 2024.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Data Engineering and AI Solutions expert in the Travel industry.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Data EngineeringMachine LearningBig Data AnalyticsBig DataMobile Development

Other Skills

AI SolutionsAmazon Web Services (AWS)ApacheBashBig Data StackBusiness IntelligenceCloud ComputingCross-functional Team LeadershipData CaptureData PipelinesData Platform EngineeringData ProcessingData SystemsDevOpsE-commerce

About

Experience

Makemytrip

VP, Head Data Platform Engineering & Personalization

Jan 2016 – Present · 10 yrs 2 mos · Gurgaon, India

As India’s leading online travel company with an impressive combined desktop and mobile MAU of 45 million, MakeMyTrip sees machine learning (ML) as a key driver for continued growth by delivering personalized experiences for every customer from recommendations to in-location engagement.
DataPlatform Team is a horizontal function at MakeMyTrip to support various LOBs (Flights, Hotels, Holidays, Ground) having two key responsibilities:-
1. Develop the platform for data capture, storage, processing, serving and querying.
2. Develop "Data Products" starting from:-
Personalization & recommendation platform
Customer segmentation & intelligence
Data Insights engine powering persuasions and
the customer engagement platform to help marketers craft contextual and personalized campaigns over multi-channel communications to users
MakeMyTrip developed Feature Store, an internal unified data analytics platform that helps to build reliable data pipelines, simplify featurization and accelerate model training. This enabled us to enjoy actionable insights into what customers want, at scale, and to drive richer, personalized online experiences.

Data Platform EngineeringPersonalizationMachine LearningData CaptureData ProcessingData Engineering

Advisor healthcare

Co Founder

May 2015 – Jan 2016 · 8 mos · Gurgaon, India

Advisor Healthcare aims to bring a change to the Healthcare industry in India through its unique "Virtual Hospital", based on marketplace model - where it enables digital interactions between healthcare providers and patients, so that the consultation can take place remotely.
As a platform, it has a combination of marketplace, digital communication, personal health records and health assistant; and hence, it helps a patient during his/her entire course of treatment, irrespective of its online or offline consultation.
In India, connecting and following up with a doctor is a daunting task as 80% of the healthcare infrastructure resides in top 20 cities. And unavailability of personal health data and medical records make it even worse. With its technology and proposition, Advisor Healthcare aims to disrupt Indian Healthcare market of remote consultation, continuous care, follow-up and second opinion using chat, audio and video solution for better connect between healthcare providers and receivers. As per several reports, India is emerging as world capital for diabetic and chronic patients; this validate the need of a system which can help a patient in continuous care and remote consultation.
Checkout Advisor Healthcare Mobile Health App : http://healthadvisor.xyz
Patient Portal : http://advisor.healthcare
Clinical/Doctor Portal : http://doctor.advisor.healthcare
Doctor's Virtual Clinic on Android : http://doctorclinic.online
Child Care - Consult Doctor : http://child.hcare.io/app

Droom technology

Senior Director- Engineering

Oct 2014 – Apr 2015 · 6 mos

Building India’s first mobile marketplace to buy and sell new and used automobiles.
http://droom.in/app

Makemytrip

2 roles

Senior Manager - Data Systems

Promoted

Apr 2014 – Oct 2014 · 6 mos

Technical lead for MakeMyTrip's data systems/ BI, implementing lambda architecture stack/system to power data processing and building services for personalization play @ MMYT along with recommendation engine (collaborative & content-based filtering), data products.
Starting from architecture design to implementation of scalable bigdata stack using distributed data systems.
Key Projects/Initiatives include:-
Building 360 degree Customer Profile : ORB
Developed Near Real-Time Data Pipelines for Mobile Apps for Session Continuation across devices
Development of Data Services Platform : MyDSP
Personare BigData Platform
Build tools and infrastructure for the collection, analysis and visualization of data using open source software.
Continuously solving the challenge of combining data/information from multiple data sources.
Tech Stack:
Apache Storm, Hadoop, Kafka, Camus, Zookeeper, Logstash, Couchbase, ElasticSearch, Voldemort, Pentaho Data Integration/Kettle, MySQL/MariaDB, Vertica, ESB (Enterprise Service Bus - Camel, Drools, CXF , ActiveMQ & Spring), R, Python, Mahout, Hive, Scalding, Cassandra, WSO2 API Manager.

Data SystemsBig Data StackData ProcessingData EngineeringBig Data

Manager - Website Operations

Sep 2008 – Mar 2014 · 5 yrs 6 mos

MakeMyTrip is the pioneer of the Online Travel Industry in India.
Team: Website Operations
Summary: http://piyush.me/2013/10/24/five-years-makemytrip-journey-hacker/
#! Development & Setup of following tools:
Biz-Eye Mon (In-house Monitoring/Reporting tool)
Biz-Eye Sync tool : rsync tasks + rollback + MySQL logging
BigIP LBManager for managing LTM and GTM using Django / PyControl
Cheetah Framework– Global Monitoring System (my contribution - from Idea to complete Product) - Cheetah uses Selenium-RC and Jenkins(Hudson) integration for Real Time monitoring of website with nice Reporting and Alerting system developed from scratch.
Ganglia cluster monitoring: creating custom monitors using shell scripts/python, jmxsh, http, sql and setup pollers using gmetric
> @ Social :
MMT Blog: Configured Blog for MakeMyTrip : http://blog.makemytrip.com
MyIdeas Portal: developed using Drupal – people can share there ideas on portal and others can vote / comment / conversation + volunteer team to implement the best voted ideas as community.
#! System Administration
Configuration and Management of F5 loadbalancer - BigIP LTM (10.1) + iRules
Puppet / facter and MCollective for Centralized configuration management
Nagios/Centreon, OpenNMS, Neerikshan, CFEngine Administration, TWiki Administration
SysLog-NG + SPLUNK Administration / setup for centralized logging and reporting.
Primary Ownership for server setup / configuration on www.makemytrip.com and www.makemytrip.ae & us.makemytrip.com domains and SEO automation.
#! Security Administration of all MMT domains both network and web application security and SPOC to security audit companies for MakeMyTrip
First level scan VA/PT test for any new application / code change for applications under business critical path.
Administration and configuration management of IPS – Checkpoint and Imperva SecureSphere WAF(Web Application Firewall)

Nextag

Quality Engineer

Jul 2006 – Sep 2008 · 2 yrs 2 mos

NexTag is a Software product development organization focused on e-commerce comparison shopping domain for products, financial services, travel, automobiles, real estate, education and more (Ranked #2 in world in this domain), US founded and headquartered, with development centers in US and India, and revenue centers spreading in entire Europe apart from US.
Team: QA-Infrastructure/Operations at NexTag, Gurgaon (India) center.
Primary Job role: Operations/QA-Infra
NexTag App Tech. /Platform: Java, Lucene, MySQL, Linux.
Responsibilities:
Testing of NexTag App, Components are:
Search Indexes(PS-product shopping)
Cache System
M1 Monitoring App[NexTag Monitoring Tool]
Scripts Testing
Automation (Replay, JMeter, JProfiler, Cobertura, Selenium)
(Primary contact for escalations regarding Production issues on above components by NOC)
Environment Administration of QA Servers (Setup/Configuration of NexTag App-Environment Support includes setup Linux Server(virtual + physical), Apache HTTP/Tomcat servers, MySQL server and NexTag Application based on different Server Types)
Managing F5 BigIP (9.3 LTM) in QA & Google Mini (Internal Search Engine)
Performance Testing of OS, Apache HTTP server, Tomcat + Every New Release