Jan 2016 – Present · 10 yrs 2 mos · Greater Bengaluru Area

• At Vahan.ai, I’m the one setting the direction, making sure we’re always on course to revolutionize recruitment for India’s blue-collar workforce with AI.
• My job? Keeping the ship steady—bringing in top talent, ensuring the bank balance stays healthy, and navigating whatever challenges come our way.
• It’s all about building something meaningful with a great team and having a bit of fun along the way :) Looking for a role? Write to us at hr@vahan.ai

Oct 2013 – Jul 2015 · 1 yr 9 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

• Helped guide product strategy and design decisions
• Worked closely with the company CEO and other leaders to align product with business goals
• Mentored junior engineers and helped shape technology strategy, operations and team culture
• Spent about 50% of my time coding

Jan 2012 – Sep 2013 · 1 yr 8 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

• Initiated and led the implementation of a service-oriented architecture (on the core codebase).
• Initiated and led the implementation of an automated testing/CI system (unit tests and functional tests).
• Designed and implemented a REST-RPC-hybrid web API for the purpose of integration with third parties.
• Supported and maintained application infrastructure.
• Developed a number of key features on the web application including the ‘RFP Proposal View’ – our bread-and-butter.
• Played a key part in the process of repayment of technical debt:
• i. Refactored critical parts of the codebase.
• ii. Initiated and led the migration of the web application from CodeIgniter to Symfony.
• iii. Helped plan and execute the migration of the primary database from MongoDB to Postgres.
• Ran direct-to-brand sales operations; automated lead generation and optimized outreach.
• Presented/demo-ed the product at meetups/conferences (including Ingenuity 2013).
• Ran a search engine marketing campaign on Google (grew CTR from 0.42% to 0.91% at campaign conclusion).
• Actively played a role in shaping company culture, with a focus on high-performance:
• i. Facilitated formalization of company values, and their subsequent adoption.
• ii. Implemented Google’s OKR process within the product/engineering team.
• iii. Introduced and helped implement the concept of product/feature ownership for engineers.
• iv. Launched a technology blog.
• v. Ran a monthly book club for which reading material was carefully chosen to be highly relevant to the business - the goal being the instilling of leadership qualities in employees.

Feb 2011 – Jan 2012 · 11 mos

• Served as a "full-stack" engineer on the product and technology team. I was part of the team that won a Webby award in the travel category in June 2011, cementing our place as the market leader in the online luxury travel space.
• Actively participated in the recruiting/interviewing process for engineers; represented Gilt/Jetsetter at the Columbia University Career Fair, 2012.
• Implemented a personalization engine on the site employing various machine learning techniques; integrated this engine with the email delivery system. Initial testing showed a 20% increase in CTR on newsletter emails.
• Refactored critical parts of the codebase including the subsystems that handle hotels and images on the website.
• Built a custom 'Email Platform' that allowed the creation of email templates from a library of modules. This allowed the email marketing team to easily create and test different email templates without having to write a single line of code.
• Built an email delivery tool that supported template-level testing and featured tight integration with Exact Target's SOAP API. The tool was successfully used to test a new email template that showed a 2.5% (absolute) improvement in CTR on the site's newsletter emails.
• Affected a 15% improvement in the #requests/second on the site's homepage (over a vanilla set-up of the Zend Framework) by minimizing the runs through the framework's dispatch loop.
• Built the skeleton of our set-up of the Zend Framework and initiated the porting of the web application to the framework.
• Packages/Technologies used: Matlab, Gephi (network visualization), Micro Strategy, Exact Target, SOAP, Lighttpd, Fast-CGI.
• Platforms used: Mac OSX, Open Solaris.
• Languages used: PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS.
• Databases used: MySQL, MongoDB (NoSQL).

Jul 2009 – Feb 2011 · 1 yr 7 mos

• Received the 'Incredibles Award', one of the company's highest forms of recognition, for exemplifying 'tenacity' -- one of NextJump's core values.
• Owned (designed, built and maintained) multiple web-based applications for the company's Corporate Perks line of websites.
• Helped build and scale various versions of the Overwhelming Offer application -- a high traffic application that received upwards of 15K requests in a span of a few minutes during certain times of the day; worked extensively with Redis (NoSQL DB).
• Led an engineering team in building the complex, multi-million dollar MasterCard World web site from scratch (entire stack); completed in only 8 weeks.
• Built a travel application featuring in-path hotel booking enabled by tight integration with Priceline.com's Hotel POX, REST-based API.
• Incorporated elements of personalization into the company's proprietary OfferRank algorithm (used to present a ranked list of deals/offers to users) that affected an improvement of 3% in the click through rate on related pages.
• Built a themed seasonal offers application that presented users with merchandized collections of deals relevant to the current season (e.g. travel deals in the summer, clothes and boots in the Fall, electronics and furniture for the Back to School season, gift cards for the Holiday season).
• SEOed the public facing Corporate Perks websites which affected a 7x increase in organic traffic from search.
• Packages/Technologies suites used: VMWare, MaxMind GeoIP City Database, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Insights for Search.
• Platforms used: MS Windows, RHEL (Linux).
• Languages used: PHP, Java (J2EE), Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript.
• Databases used: MS SQL Server, Redis (NoSQL).

Mar 2009 – Jul 2009 · 4 mos

• Owned the search feature on the Corporate Perks line of websites. I improved the performance of the core search technology used on the company's web-products; affected a 12% improvement in search result relevance.
• Packages/Technologies used: Solr (Lucene), Google Search Appliance.
• Platform used: MS Windows.
• Languages used: Java, ColdFusion, HTML, CSS, Javascript.
• Database used: MS SQL Server.

Jun 2008 – Aug 2008 · 2 mos

• Created software to facilitate technical support for API integration -- the software was designed to information to the support team to help them determine whether or not one of the company's API was installed correctly on the customer's system. Worked with C, and bash shell scripting on Linux, IBM AIX, HPUX and Solaris. The task of making the software compatible with these platforms was the chief challenge faced during this project.
• Developed and integrated a "transliterator" module (in C) with one of the company's chief products (an API). This API is shipped out in the form of a shared library -- methods from it can be called as extended stored procedures from a DBMS. The transliterator was tested from Oracle (on various Unix platforms and Windows) and MSSQL.
• Platforms used: RHEL (Linux), IBM AIX, HPUX, Solaris.
• Languages used: C, C++, Java, SQL, Bash scripting.
• Databases used: Oracle, MS SQL Server.

Sep 2007 – Jun 2008 · 9 mos · New York

• As a Natural Language Processing researcher, I developed a state-of-the-art technique for unsupervised classification of verb-noun Multi-word Expressions (idioms).
• Packages/Software Suites used: WEKA, Minipar parser, BBN Identifinder NER system, Matlab.
• Platform used: RHEL (Linux).
• Language used: Perl.