A

Akash Khandelwal

Director of Engineering

Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands13 yrs 7 mos experience
AI ML PractitionerAI Enabled

Key Highlights

  • Led engineering for Booking.com's Vacation Rentals Segment.
  • Successfully launched high-performing teams at Flipkart.
  • Expert in Machine Learning and Recommender Systems.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS and E-Commerce expert with strong leadership in engineering management.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

LeadershipTechnical LeadershipProduct DevelopmentMachine LearningCoachingEngineering ManagementStakeholder ManagementStorytellingInformation RetrievalArchitectureData SciencePersonalization

Other Skills

HiringGenerative AIResource AllocationManaging ManagersDiversity & InclusionStrategic ThinkingStrategic LeadershipOrganizational DesignHigh Performance TeamsInterpersonal LeadershipEngineering LeadershipOrganizational PsychologySoftware as a Service (SaaS)MicroservicesConflict Resolution

About

Senior Engineering Manager at Booking.com. Managing an Org including 4 EMs and total of 27 reports, responsible for Partner Facing portfolio of Booking Home. Previously: Tech lead working at Flipkart, to enable a delightful discovery experience to customers via targeted search and recommendations. Skilled in Java, Machine Learning, Search & Recommender Systems, and MapReduce. Strong engineering professional with a Dual Degree (B.Tech. + M.Tech.) focused in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Experience

13 yrs 7 mos
Total Experience
8 yrs 4 mos
Average Tenure
5 yrs 3 mos
Current Experience

Booking.com

2 roles

Senior Engineering Manager

Promoted

Mar 2023Present · 3 yrs 2 mos · Amsterdam Area

  • Leading engineering for a track which focuses on winning the Vacation Rentals Segment (which accounts for over 35% of Booking.com) and managing a team of managers and senior ICs. I partnered with Product, Data Science, Marketing and UX to define a 5-year strategy.
  • My teams are focused on optimizing conversion for travelers on Booking.com, doing 100+ customer facing experiments; using Machine Learning and GenAI to find suitable stays based on user inputs
  • My role includes managing career growth for my org, coaching EMs to form high performance teams, managing FTE & consultants (OPEX) budgets, establishing system reliability standards, and influencing cross-org dependencies during annual planning.
  • I conducted an upskilling workshop for a team of 5 Senior EMs and 25 EMs in our department, leading the event budget & logistics, interactive activities, coordinating facilitators and baking in industry trends to maximize engagement
HiringGenerative AIResource AllocationManaging ManagersDiversity & InclusionStorytelling+6

Engineering Manager

Feb 2021Mar 2023 · 2 yrs 1 mo · Amsterdam Area

  • Long Stays: Led strategic function to expand the accommodation offering to 30+ nights, coordinated roadmap with critical user-path platforms including Availability and Pricing. Mentored and grew direct reports to both IC and manager tracks
  • Request to Book: Bootstrapped and built high performing team via decentralized decision-making, creating succession plans, & developing psychological safety. Launched pilot in record time of 8 months
  • Booking Tech Blog : Defined milestones and structured the process and success metrics for the
  • publications initiative, led the blog working group, partnered with Tech Directors to enhance Booking.com as a tech brand, defined new blog formats including videos and podcasts, and established feedback loops to elevate the quality of blog content.
  • Link : https://blog.booking.com ✍️
Product DevelopmentEngineering ManagementInterpersonal LeadershipEngineering LeadershipCoachingOrganizational Psychology+8

Flipkart

5 roles

Tech Lead (Engineering Manager)

Jul 2019Feb 2021 · 1 yr 7 mos

  • Responsible for people management, tech roadmap, design and execution for
  • Autosuggest : Powers search suggestions on Flipkart, including candidate generation, ranking and relevance (10 member team)
  • Mira : Optimizing search navigation, enabling conversational search experience on Flipkart (4 member team)
Product DevelopmentEngineering ManagementInformation RetrievalInterpersonal CommunicationStakeholder ManagementHigh Performance Teams

Software Development Engineer IV

Promoted

Jul 2017Jun 2019 · 1 yr 11 mos

  • Worked on
  • a) Improving product discovery via relevance and Ranking optimization
  • b) Leading Matching and Ranking for Autosuggest
  • c) Building Robust Data Pipelines for Query Understanding
Machine LearningArchitectureStrategic ThinkingDistributed Systems

Software Development Engineer III

Aug 2015Jun 2017 · 1 yr 10 mos

  • ML Based Ranking of Product Pivoted Recommendations
  • a) Identifying the right feature set towards improving Conversion and User Engagement
  • b) Designing and Implementing ETL pipelines for feature gathering, training and scoring items
  • c) Performing iterations of AB experiments with varying feature sets
  • Short Paper at ACM Recsys based on work by my team : Recommending Repeat Purchases using Product Segment Statistics (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2959100.2959145)
Data StructuresData Science

Software Development Engineer II

Promoted

Oct 2013Jul 2015 · 1 yr 9 mos

  • Improving Flipkart recommender system
  • a) Computing personalized profile of every user using Lambda Architecture
  • b) Identified and implemented metrics for offline evaluation of recommender system
  • c) Catering for diverse recommendation formats towards multiple objective functions, including increasing basket size, improving shipments per order, diversity of content and conversion.
PersonalizationAlgorithmsMentoring

Software Development Engineer

Jul 2012Oct 2013 · 1 yr 3 mos

  • Building Flipkart Recommendation Engine
  • a) Using collaborative filtering over user activity data to derive item to item recommendations
  • b) Adding visual similarity and attribute matching to solve for cold start
  • c) Deriving cross-selling patterns using historical purchase patterns
JavaInformation RetrievalFull-Stack DevelopmentCommunicationAlgorithmsE-Commerce

Ibm

Information Management Group, IBM India Research Lab

May 2010Jul 2010 · 2 mos · New Delhi Area, India

Information RetrievalAlgorithms

Education

Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Dual Degree (B.Tech. + M.Tech.) — Computer Science and Engineering

Jan 2007Jan 2012

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