Rajesh Sharma

Director of Engineering

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India10 yrs 3 mos experience
AI EnabledHighly Stable

Key Highlights

  • Led AI transformation initiatives at Mercari.
  • Scaled engineering teams from inception to 80+ engineers.
  • Established strong leadership pipelines and delivery structures.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS engineering leader with expertise in cloud infrastructure and AI-driven transformations.

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Skills

Core Skills

Engineering LeadershipCloud ApplicationsNetwork ArchitectureTeam LeadershipIstio

Other Skills

AIAJAXAlgorithmsApache PigArchitectural DesignBashCCSSContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)Cost ReductionDatabasesDatadogDevOpsElasticsearchFinOps

About

Senior Engineering Leader with 12+ years of global experience across cloud platforms, infrastructure, and large-scale engineering management. I specialize in building organizations from the ground up, scaling high-performing teams, and driving cross-functional impact across regions. Currently leading the Foundation & Platform Group at Mercari India, where I oversee multiple engineering divisions that support Mercari Japan’s core operations—including Trust & Safety, Coupons, Cloud Infrastructure, Observability, SRE, Security, IT, and Corporate Engineering. My leadership philosophy is simple but powerful: Step in, solve, and scale—especially where ownership is missing. I'm a hands-on leader who thrives in ambiguity, bridges execution gaps, and accelerates delivery while developing strong technical and people leaders. At Mercari, I’ve played a central role in scaling the India engineering organization from the ground up, mentoring senior ICs and EMs, and now leading the transformation toward an AI-native organization—embedding LLM-powered tooling and AI-first workflows to boost engineering velocity and org-wide productivity. I believe in building not just teams, but sustainable leadership pipelines and resilient engineering cultures that grow in lockstep with the business.

Experience

Mercari india

2 roles

Senior Engineering Manager | Platform & Foundation Leader | AI Transformation | Global Team Builder

Promoted

Aug 2023Present · 2 yrs 7 mos · Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India · On-site

  • Key contributor behind Mercari India’s engineering expansion, scaling the organization from inception to 80+ engineers across platform and business-critical domains. Established a strong leadership pipeline and delivery structure to support global impact.
  • Key Contributions:
  • Lead multiple engineering teams across business-critical domains powering Mercari Japan’s core operations including Trust & Safety, Coupons, Cloud Network, SRE, Corporate Engineering, and Security & Compliance.
  • Define and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for Platform India, ensuring alignment with Mercari’s global product and business objectives.
  • Build and scale high-impact, mission-aligned teams, hiring and enabling top talent from junior ICs to senior engineers and EMs, laying the foundation for Mercari’s Global Capability Center (GCC) in India.
  • Mentor and develop senior engineers and managers, fostering technical excellence, collaboration, and leadership growth.
  • Manage engineering budgets and resource allocation, optimizing for innovation, efficiency, and long-term strategic value.
  • Drive AI adoption across the platform organization, integrating LLM-powered tools, automating workflows, and elevating engineering productivity.
  • Shape a strong, ownership-driven engineering culture focused on clarity, speed, and continuous improvement.
  • Operate with a clear principle: step in, solve, and scale where ownership is missing, positioning India as a key innovation and execution hub within Mercari’s global engineering strategy.
Architectural DesignStrategic PlanningEngineering LeadershipCloud ApplicationsInfrastructure as a Service (IaaS)Organizational Leadership+47

Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering

Nov 2022Jul 2023 · 8 mos · Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India · On-site

  • Built the Platform Engineering group in India from the ground up, scaling to 10+ engineers across Infrastructure, Observability, and Network domains.
  • Led end-to-end hiring, onboarding, and foundational architecture setup, establishing a strong technical presence in India.
  • Defined long-term strategic roadmaps aligned with business outcomes, prioritized delivery goals, and provided technical guidance to senior team members.
  • Successfully bridged Japan-India collaboration gaps, driving strong cross-regional engineering culture and execution alignment.
Organizational LeadershipStakeholder ManagementStrategic ThinkingProfessional MentoringEngineering LeadershipGrowth Strategies+8

Mercari, inc.

3 roles

Tech Lead

Jan 2021Nov 2022 · 1 yr 10 mos

  • Lead the network sub-team(~4-5 members), create all the roadmaps and plans for the projects assigned to the team. Report all the progress to upper management and gather metrics for each project to show the impact of the project from several aspects.
  • Rearchitectured the Edge Gateway from monolith to distributed gateway using Istio Ingress Gateway. This empowers service developers to release their endpoints to the internet autonomously.
  • Implement multi-layer rate-limiting policies for the entire endpoints in Mercari at the CDN level. This increased the security of the edge to prevent any kind of DDOS attacks or malicious traffic.
  • Define network policies and security boundaries for the whole organization to improve the security and observability of the platform.
  • Implement the network security policies using terraform and automated enabling of VPC flow logs and firewall rule logs for all GCP projects.
  • Introduce Istio to improve the 3 pillars (Security, Observability and Reliability)
  • Key person in Istio adoptoion. Collaborated with all microservice tech leads to discuss their issues and solve them using a servicemesh based approach
IstioNetwork ArchitectureTeam LeadershipScriptingGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)

Lead Platform Engineer

Jan 2020Dec 2020 · 11 mos

  • Building a secure and reliable platform on top of Kubernetes to help developers build & deploy microservices
  • Provide tools and services to boost the agility of service developers and monitor the services with high observability
  • Operate datadog for providing observability to more than 250 microservices. Along operations reduce the cost by configuring the mandatory logs, custom metrics and APM traces
  • As a sub-team lead manage 3-4 members. Responsibilities include defining the goals and roadmap for team members, reporting progress to higher management and continuous technical support to members

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Feb 2019Dec 2019 · 10 mos

  • Managed infrastructure for 50+ microservices, ensuring performance and scalability
  • Oversaw 24/7 monitoring and on-call duties for payment microservices with Datadog and PagerDuty.
  • Automated operations for GKE, Spanner, and CloudSQL, enhancing efficiency.
  • Established end-to-end pipelines with CircleCI and Spinnaker for microservice code deployment, reducing downtimeker

Works applications co., ltd.

Producer & Tech Lead

Mar 2017Feb 2019 · 1 yr 11 mos · Tokyo, Japan

  • Product leader and Technical advisor
  • Managing and working with 4 remote development teams to develop ERP products from scratch. Continuously follow up the development cycle to achieve the deadline and release on time.
  • Business requirement gathering, reviewing Catalogs & Specification documents before communicating with remote teams.
  • Creating new formats for documents that can be used by the design team to create requirements
  • Reviewing Cassandra data models also supports to create data models and Elastic search indexes
  • Support remote teams for technical issues as well as specification-related issues
  • Mentoring remote teams and new grads about the internal frameworks to fasten software development
  • Continuous Integration and DevOps
  • Working with the Continuous Integration team to deploy remotely developed ERP products.
  • Setup local automated environments to deploy in-house frameworks and ERP applications
  • Continuous synchronization of source code development remotely (from the Chennai office)
  • Technologies used: Jenkins, Shell script, Ansible, Docker, Tomcat, Drone (CI tool).
  • R&D Engineer
  • Working with the back-end team to implement service and data layer to develop an ERP software called Talent Search via which user can search and view employee profiles within the company
  • Develop data models, implement new features & fix bugs, Technologies used: Java 8, Google closure, JavaScript, Cassandra, Elastic search

Rakuten

2 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Jan 2015Dec 2016 · 1 yr 11 mos · Tokyo, Japan

  • Developing enhancement features for “e-Navi” a credit card user portal which has bill payments, user campaigns, point grant, cashing services and other features.
  • Projects include front-end and back-end side both, using Java EE 6 framework and weblogic server

Software Developer

Oct 2014Dec 2016 · 2 yrs 2 mos · Tokyo, Japan

  • Developed a campaign and push notification application for merchants, shoppers and admin.
  • Responsibilities include gathering requirements and developing both responsive frontend and backend apis. Technologies used: JavaEE7, Java SE 8, Glassfish, Oracle and Sonar.

Yahoo!

Technical Internship

May 2013Jul 2013 · 2 mos · Bangalore

  • Enhanced Content Understanding from Yahoo Answers
  • Upgraded Yahoo answers Information Retrieval system to retrieve better answers from corpus
  • based on content.
  • Designed an algorithm for density-based scoring and gained insight in Yahoo Vespa an indexing tool, Apache Pig and Hadoop database systems.
  • Worked on Image search - Fetched related images from news documents on basis of any arbitrary query.

P.i jain & company labour advisors

Application Developer

Dec 2012Jan 2013 · 1 mo · Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

  • Developed an Online labour management web application which handled labour attendance and generates payrolls, catering to needs of 372 client companies.
  • Designed and implemented Database model for the system.
  • Automated entire process of payroll generation, saving 3000+ working hours, cutting cost by 75%.

Silgate solutions

Technical Intern

May 2012Jul 2012 · 2 mos · Mumbai Metropolitan Region

  • Built a scalable PHP based Pharmacy Parser to parse huge amount of plain text and convert it into tabulated database.
  • Worked on a US-based Healthcare Website, modified UI, solved cross browsing issues and implemented Access rights management.

Education

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Bachelor's Degree — Computer Science & Engineering

Jan 2010Jan 2014

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