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 2023 – Present · 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 2021 – Mar 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 2019 – Feb 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 2017 – Jun 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 2015 – Jun 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 2013 – Jul 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 2012 – Oct 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