Nov 2021 – Oct 2024 · 2 yrs 11 mos

• Getting data curated and ready for the thousands of ML experiments that run at LinkedIn forces us to build adaptive systems. DARWIN, a platform product that aids online and batch data analysis, morphed into a complete business vertical – product, engineering and SRE functions run out of Bangalore. This disrupted status quo, rationalized a suite of expensive products and self-served 'value out of data' for wide range of data users - ML, AI, Marketing.
• Pushing data and inference to the edge helps users make informed decisions - foundation for data driven culture. The central mission of the team is to engineer platforms for iterative experimentation, promote it to prod seamlessly helping build data products at scale. To achieve the goal of targeted and quick analytics, our team now manages data gathering, observability, discovery using metadata and the metrics platforms. Near real time analytics and subsequent curation of tracking data at scale to understand user behavior, then to use this clean data for ML model training.
• Crafted a well-balanced team - levels, skills and diversity. Hiring people who question status quo, rebels who value thinking differently were some of the pillars in scouting for talent.
• Co-Authored four papers, working with academia, solving industry problems in distributed computing using novel approaches. Three papers have already been published, one in the highly prestigious Journal of Supercomputing. (It has multiple levels of screening for final acceptance)
• Active in Universities - teaching, grooming employable talent and investing in diversity PhD candidates. Our first female PhD candidate successfully defended her thesis in May 2025. Played an active role in external branding for LinkedIn Bangalore Engineering, helping attract talent for all areas in Bangalore.

Sep 2019 – Oct 2021 · 2 yrs 1 mo

• Building the strategy for Data First approach in LinkedIn was the key goal. The challenge of taming trillions of messages daily with big data technologies, at planet scale (exabytes) on one of the worlds largest Hadoop system is exhilarating!
• Envisioning new products, building them with full ownership in Bangalore, concept to production scale, helped groom very senior talent in Bangalore. Our ability to do leading edge work helped hire the first ever principal engineer in Bangalore. Seeded the Compute as a Platform team, run fully out of Bangalore, that will power on-prem and Cloud, seamless compute across both being the end goal. Abstraction as a key tenet drove all the platform work our teams did.
• Garnering highest customer satisfaction score on Compliance and Privacy Platforms is a crowning achievement, for a project fully owned from Bangalore. Driving low-latency, reducing production tickets from 70 to less than 3 a week, ensuring robustness in managing privacy - getting it right from both business and technology dimensions, was core to LinkedIn honoring the trust our members expect from us.
• Seeded new projects and grew the teams significantly to deliver durable business impact. Built strong automation to reduce manpower and increase agility. Recognized for building small teams that deliver outsize impact.

Jan 2019 – Aug 2019 · 7 mos

• Played a key role in leading the Bangalore engineering teams that worked on two projects - maintain and selectively enhance the existing on-prem version of the product and the maiden move to Cloud. As the India tech and operations leader for the largest independent data platform company, drove newer technical direction along with building products that redefine speed, scale and volume.
• Actively participated in pre-sales calls helping sales team articulate the value of our product to prospective customers. Worked with the largest APAC customer to renegotiate license fee and support contract for the product offering.
• Had P&L responsibility. Played significant role in large value contract renewals - both as BU head and as tech head.

Jan 2018 – Nov 2018 · 10 mos · Palo Alto

• Head of the global engineering organization helping build products at scale. Member of the executive team (e-staff) responsible for product strategy. Seeded cloud team to replicate the on-prem product in the Cloud stack, a new distribution channel for increasing revenue opportunities.
• Created a well balanced team by hiring strong architects and laying the foundation for an engineering focused company. While retiring tech debt, effected a platform approach to re-architect legacy code, laying a strong foundation for scale. Managed the annual budget for the engineering team. Brought in strong engineering culture to orient the team towards a more practical, incremental design approach and early feedback culture - as opposed to a 3 month product release cycle the company had when I joined. Developed key metrics to guage health of product and the team. Laid the ground work for quality engineering platforms resulting in faster testing process - along with a strong agile system this paved the way for frequent feature releases.
• In addition played the role of center head for India operations, helping build various verticals, including a strong sustenance team. This engineering support team became a good source of significant revenue for the company. As a Site Head, led the P&L responsibility.

Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 · 4 yrs

• Pro Bono adviser to help nurture India startup ecosystem. Did this in addition to full time job, purely out of passion to help startup ecosystem grow in APAC region.

Dec 2014 – Jan 2018 · 3 yrs 1 mo · Greater Boston

• Seeded the office and engineering talent to solve the problem of "what is the right ad to display", one ad consumer at a time! The ability to synergize big data with real time display of just the right ad, is both engineering and business challenge. Our core mission was to innovate for business.
• Establishing new operations in any country is a rewarding leadership challenge - from working with federal government for approvals to convincing engineers to come on board and deliver impact.
• Led the Metrics & Monitoring team for all of DataXu from Bangalore - our team developed a centralized monitoring platform that helped the real time bidding system to track many leading indicators to enable winning bids in real time by drawing insights using big data - 22 PB of data!
• As a bonus, we also could monitor lagging indicators - example data ingested, predicting SLA's etc. in near real time. A new pacing algorithm helped save huge costs. These twin achievements aided better monetization of our assets.
• The responsibility mirrored India CEO role, a term coined by Global CEO. Our office also had a P&L responsibility, working closely with our Finance teams and adhering to compliances with Govt. procedures.

Jan 2011 – Dec 2014 · 3 yrs 11 mos

• Responsible for seeding and building science and analytics. Seeded the team and scaled it to Global Big Data team for Nokia. Managed six PB of data and over 26000 workflows in 'Hadoop as a Cloud Service' paradigm on AWS. Actively engaged with Nokia mobile applications groups to migrate their services to AWS cloud for agility and scalability.
• Responsible for three areas- core platform; data science and analytics; visualization. Led visibility of the Analytics team to global level, all work for Big Data for all of Nokia worldwide is done out of Bangalore. Led and managed a disruptive change from private in-house data-center to public cloud – driven by the business need for cost, speed and scale - making technology work to solve real needs. As part of doing this looked for ways to eke out efficiency in cost and value - led the tech challenge to come up with mechanisms to reuse resource to save cost - partnership with Amazon to build job manager for example. Successfully executed on university relationship program, generating a hundred thousand dollars cost savings on validation efforts, just on human resource.
• Piloted and led the effort to change mobile device data collection methodology to improve speed and latency by 50%, leading to a decision to move to Managed Hadoop on Cloud paradigm. Drove the vision - API, provisioning, integrated user experience and cost-feature trade-off. Instituted a new culture of pair programming and daily builds (CI/CD) to boost productivity. Simplified application on-boarding process to Cloud - from days to hours, thus gaining stronger adoption. Also managed budgets and spends (mini P&L) for Bangalore.

Oct 2007 – Jan 2011 · 3 yrs 3 mos

• Brought on board to seed and groom a high performance team to solve a crucial issue Yahoo Search faced - the problem of scale. Direct the very fast paced development of Hadoop platform for the high volume storage and processing needs of Yahoo. Brought an entrepreneurial mind-set to grow high performance teams, resulting in complete ownership – from strategy, roadmap definition, execution to roll-out and support. Coached the team to embrace opposing models – this was a catalyst to wider adoption of the Hadoop Cloud and among the first fully owned and delivered projects from Yahoo Bangalore. Built and managed the team that took Apache Hadoop from a prototype to a system Yahoo! uses on 50,000+ computers (from 100 nodes when I joined) In the second role with Yahoo, led the User Data Analytics team to put to real test the Big Data Hadoop Platform we built. This technology adoption saved millions of dollars. As part of this effort, drove deployment of end-to-end data pipelines on Hadoop consuming 50 billion events daily from Yahoo's user network to learn and improve customer engagement. Delivered Web Analytics, User Segmentation, Campaign Analytics and Near-Real Time Reporting for advertisers. Segmentation was instrumental in driving ad revenue. Built models to generate millions of dollars of lift for display ads.This effort was concentrated largely in India with over 80% of the work done from Bangalore
• Delivered a scheduling software for Hadoop under very tight deadlines. Enabled innovation to solve real customer problems - researching two parallel approaches to pick the right one. Fostered a culture of innovation by leading product and tech brainstorming sessions.
• Originator of the Annual Hadoop Conference to foster open-source culture in India.
• Recognized as top 2% talent in Yahoo globally, recognized by the CEO. Was a mentor for Yahoo Emerging Leaders program. Instituted a strong University research program to collaborate and solve tough problems.

Jun 2005 – Oct 2007 · 2 yrs 4 mos · A9 Palo Alto

• Responsible for data and process architecture in A9 product space. Build and manage the A9 warehouse team. The A9 team was chartered with delivering search algorithm for Amazon book search. Overall responsibility for strategy and direction with regards to tools, processes and procedures. Provide business with insights for products based on data. Amazon's recommendation systems relied on this data.
• Championed a strategic directional change to build these warehouses on non-oracle platforms. Worked with IIT-B (Leading engineering institute) to build a prototype for this approach. Successfully delivered the product at one tenth the budgeted cost.
• Revamped data ingest framework to a more scalable architecture. This marathon parameter driven ingest pipeline processes reduced load time by 50% for the same latency as legacy system. The autoscale system performed admirably well even at 10X data load volumes.

Apr 2001 – Jun 2005 · 4 yrs 2 mos

• Chief Architect in design and development of global, application-neutral and centralized multi-phase enterprise data warehouse (EDW) for accurately capturing, integrating, storing and securely distributing data. Warehouse provided global data integration and multi-lingual support, providing IMS with a new business model -Web based client-customized global information delivery system.
• Leadership role in working with offices spread across several countries. Provide standardized global view while accommodating local diversity. Promote reuse through proper education, thus reducing cycle time to add high-quality data from new global sources.
• Recipient of Exceptional Performance Award bestowed to a very select group of outstanding achievers. The Business Intelligence and analytics framework was declared a core-asset of the company, the second time in the long history of the company.
• This global integration opened up many new possibilities for IMS Health. Working tirelessly to build quality, IMS data came to be viewed as the most authentic source of any medical data - pharma companies used IMS data to pay sales commissions to their reps. Insight delivery turn around times increased 10x or more. The insight from this system helped enable IMS to call out adverse effect of a drug even before the pharma company knew it.
• Led all the technology decisions for the warehousing and datamarts. Worked across several countries, managed architects and leads across continents and delivered a product of lasting value, still being used today.
• Very active in Philadelphia DAMA Chapter.

Jan 1996 – Jan 2001 · 5 yrs

• Develop product to provide a single knowledge repository for pharmacokinetic data (drug absorption), pharmacodynamic data (drug effect), drug metabolism and clinical pharmacology data. $2 million budget for 12 months. During active development, the team had 17 people in two countries. Brought in by the founders as Principal Consultant to aid the engineering and product development organizations to fix architectural and product delivery issues. Engineer system architecture to address transactional and decision support needs. Leadership Award for leading the first fixed bid project won by the company.

Jan 1992 – Jan 1996 · 4 yrs

• Provide technical role in analysis, design and development of student financial aid systems. Member of committee for developing C standards for use in the entire company. Pioneer the use of reusable code within the group, shared by other functional groups. Received management award and recognition for this effort. Re-engineer process to resolve performance issues – reducing run time by a factor of 100. Achievement of Client Excellence award, given when clients nominate an individual for an outstanding contribution. Engaged with Client Services to take ownership and re-architect/re-factor a process, resulting in huge run time gain (from original 45 minutes to 19 seconds)