Jan 2023 – May 2023 · 4 mos

• Drove customer adoption efforts for Azure Open AI across key industry vertical scenarios, focusing on finance and retail sectors.

Nov 2021 – Dec 2022 · 1 yr 1 mo

• Led incubation of Microsoft's investments in India's digital public infrastructure (IndiaStack) for financial services and e-commerce - namely ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) and OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network).
• Collaborated closely with government bodies, startups, academia, and cross-functional teams within Microsoft to advance product and partner initiatives.

Jan 2020 – Nov 2021 · 1 yr 10 mos

• Led product & engineering for a 0-to-1 initiative to unify Azure's database & analytics offerings, which eventually evolved into Microsoft Fabric HTAP.
• Key Highlight: Spearheaded the launch of 'Azure Synapse Link,' the first native HTAP (Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing) analytics-as-a-service across public clouds, a CEO-priority initiative.
• Played a key role in landing Coca-Cola’s global finance platform - one of Azure’s largest cloud deployments - alongside other strategic customers.
• Owned strategy, roadmap, and execution from concept to GTM over 18 months, managing a team of engineers and PMs.
• Worked cross-functionally across marketing, monetization, sales, customer success, and support to launch new platform capabilities and drive product-market fit.

Oct 2017 – Jan 2020 · 2 yrs 3 mos

• Founding member of a strategic "customer engineering" team for Azure Data & AI, inspired by Palantir's Forward Deployed Architect model. Worked cross-functionally across product and technical sales.
• Key Highlight: Led net-new growth initiatives that contributed $200M in revenue in two years.
• Revenue Growth: Designed and executed both sales-led and product-led growth initiatives. Provided strategic technical consulting to Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Adobe, helping them drive digital transformation on the Azure Data & Analytics platform.
• Ecosystem Partnerships: Developed product integrations and partnerships between Azure Cosmos DB and external ISV products, as well as first-party Microsoft services, focusing on end-to-end experiences.

Nov 2016 – Oct 2017 · 11 mos

• Worked with the Cosmos DB Platform Engineering team
• Built the bulk ingestion functionality in Azure Cosmos DB which resulted in a 10x improvement in write throughput given same compute resources
• Lead contributor for an Apache Spark connector for Azure Cosmos DB and maintained open source community
• Worked with the Azure Network Management team
• Implemented telemetry analytics for core services in network infrastructure which preemptively catches potential live site risks
• Contributed to a distributed service to increase Azure network hardware monitoring and automate failure mitigation to support Azure 10x scale & reliability goal

Dec 2021 – Jan 2023 · 1 yr 1 mo · India

• Helping design & architect some of the network infrastructure modules needed to bootstrap a population-scale open network for decentralized commerce - such as a portable reputation management system to allow for interoperability across commerce platforms
• How did I get into this? Took the opportunity to work remotely from India through 2021 and spend time understanding the challenges faced by SMEs while volunteering at BeckN Foundation (FIDE) & iSpirt

Sep 2015 – May 2017 · 1 yr 8 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

• Developed a hyper-personalized outbound recruitment platform, powered by machine learning, that analyzed the online presence of millions of students & recent grads to match them with enterprise hiring needs.
• Accepted into the NASSCOM 10,000 Startups Acceleration Program.
• Acquisition: Initially rolled up by a consultancy, then acquired by ANSR and integrated into their Talent500 product line (no longer operational after roll-up).

Oct 2014 – Sep 2015 · 11 mos · Chennai

• Initially developed a contextual Q&A product to help undergrads and research scholars stay on top of coursework and research. Launched a beta version for select courses at IIT Madras in Summer 2015 and validated the concept. Encountered scaling challenges in expanding across universities in a bottoms-up manner wherein students could be targeted.
• Pivoted to building secure APIs for instant verification of student identities, enabling college-centric apps to boost user retention by eliminating manual verification processes and minimizing fraud. This API solution provided app makers with critical data.
• We stumbled upon one such college-centric app idea - that evolved into Fastnext.

May 2014 – Jul 2014 · 2 mos · Greater Los Angeles Area

• Worked as a Visiting Research Intern in the Information Integration Group with Prof. Craig Knoblock and Prof. Pedro Szekely under the USC Viterbi-India Research Fellowship Program.
• Developed a new approach for the problem of assigning semantic labels to data sources according to a given underlying ontology, a key step in the larger problem of data integration. Experiments show that our approach has higher label prediction accuracy, lower time complexity than existing systems and is also capable of handling noise in data sources.
• The work was published and presented at the 12th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2015, Portoroz
• Incorporated the above semantic typing approach as a module in Karma, an open-source information integration tool being developed at ISI.

May 2013 – Jul 2013 · 2 mos · Bangalore

• Developed a Recommendation System for E-Commerce based on a hybrid approach of collaborative filtering and content-based clustering techniques with tweaks to handle cold-start problem, data sparsity, time & space complexity, etc. A working distributed prototype was built and and tested on MovieLens 10 million dataset.
• Developed a Data Analytics Engine which allows business users to perform ad-hoc business data analysis built above the Google BigQuery IaaS.