Vidya Kannan — Co-Founder

Shipping a great product is an important milestone, but in my experience the more interesting work begins after that moment. As platforms grow, the challenge shifts from delivering features to evolving systems that can support long-term innovation without slowing teams down. I focus on the challenges that emerge when successful products reach global scale—when systems that once served a single team or market must support millions of customers and hundreds of engineers. Much of my career has been spent helping organizations navigate that transition, working at the intersection of architecture, organizational scale, and long-term product growth. Over the past two decades I’ve worked on technology with direct customer impact, from expanding online commerce into emerging markets to building internal platforms that help developers move faster and build with greater confidence. KEY AREAS OF IMPACT: SCALING PLATFORMS AND ORGANIZATIONS: I’ve worked with engineering organizations of 300+ engineers, helping evolve single-market pilots into platforms operating across 10+ countries, while maintaining reliability and architectural clarity at significant transaction scale. CONNECTING ARCHITECTURE TO BUSINESS IMPACT: The teams I’ve worked with have helped design shopping experiences generating $1B+ in revenue and contributing to roughly 8% of global customer acquisition, illustrating how platform investments directly support growth. PLATFORM EVOLUTION AND GENAI: More recently I’ve been working with teams on how long-lived systems incorporate Generative AI capabilities, helping organizations adopt new technologies while maintaining the stability large platforms require. BUILDING MECHANISMS THAT SCALE: Technology platforms scale best when organizations do as well. As a certified Amazon Bar Raiser, I’ve contributed to hiring practices designed to maintain strong engineering standards as teams grow. What continues to motivate me is helping create the foundations that allow strong teams to move quickly and sustainably. When platforms are designed well and organizations align around clear principles, innovation tends to compound naturally.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a seasoned expert in E-commerce and Digital Retail with a focus on scalable platform architecture.

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Experience: 15 yrs 2 mos

Skills

Platform Architecture
Scalability
Product Management
Product Development
System Architecture
Software Development

Career Highlights

Expert in scaling platforms for global markets.
Led initiatives generating over $2B in revenue.
Certified Amazon Bar Raiser ensuring high hiring standards.

Work Experience

Amazon

Foundational Platforms - Retail (Global Scale) (9 yrs 11 mos)

Kohl's Department Stores

Mobile Commerce Platform and Digital Retail Growth (1 yr 6 mos)

Groupon

Discovery & Personalization Systems (1 yr 5 mos)

Netflix

Digital Movie Supply Chain Platform and Recommendation Systems (6 mos)

Amazon

Mobile Messaging Platform and SMS APIs (1 yr 11 mos)

Education

Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) at University of Southern California

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) at UC San Diego

Vidya Kannan

Co-Founder

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India15 yrs 2 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI Enabled

Key Highlights

Expert in scaling platforms for global markets.
Led initiatives generating over $2B in revenue.
Certified Amazon Bar Raiser ensuring high hiring standards.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a seasoned expert in E-commerce and Digital Retail with a focus on scalable platform architecture.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Platform ArchitectureScalabilityProduct ManagementProduct DevelopmentSystem ArchitectureSoftware Development

Other Skills

AmazonAPIplatform scalingarchitectural claritycustomer acquisitiontechnical debt managementcross-functional collaborationrevenue growthmobile commerceP&L managementmobile app developmentdigital innovationuser experience designtransaction managementpersonalization systemsdata-driven products

About

Experience

15 yrs 2 mos

Total Experience

3 yrs

Average Tenure

9 yrs 11 mos

Current Experience

Amazon

Foundational Platforms - Retail (Global Scale)

Jul 2016 – Present · 9 yrs 11 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Much of my time at Amazon was spent working on the challenges that emerge when successful products begin operating at massive global scale. My focus was on building the systems, platforms, and organizational mechanisms that allow hundreds of teams to innovate while maintaining reliability and architectural clarity.
Key areas of impact included:
Scaling platform access across large engineering organizations: Designed and scaled AmazonAPI, a unified Tier-1 gateway that became the single entry point for all internal teams, enabling consistent and reliable access to shared commerce capabilities while supporting high-volume traffic ($5MM TPS) at global scale.
Served as the lead for the end-to-end strategy and execution to deprecate a legacy commerce platform (Gurupa) used across Amazon Retail. Defined the deprecation roadmap from first principles, aligning engineering, product, and operations teams across the organization to sequence dependencies and remove architectural bottlenecks. Delivered a clean system sunset across multiple parallel workstreams, eliminating technical debt and restoring platform velocity without customer disruption.
Led the transformation for shopping experiences initially focused on a single region into broader emerging-market platforms, contributing to $2B+ in revenue while supporting Amazon’s international expansion.
Currently focused on customer acquisition initiatives, with platform work helping drive approximately 8% of overall U.S. growth through new customer acquisition and $1Bn in revenue in the most recent year.
Served as a certified Amazon Bar Raiser, helping maintain strong hiring and engineering standards as the organization continued to grow.
This work focused on ensuring that as Amazon scaled globally, the underlying platforms and engineering organizations were able to move quickly without sacrificing long-term architectural health.

AmazonAPIplatform scalingarchitectural claritycustomer acquisitiontechnical debt managementPlatform Architecture+1

Kohl's department stores

Mobile Commerce Platform and Digital Retail Growth

Aug 2014 – Feb 2016 · 1 yr 6 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Led the product and development teams responsible for Kohl’s consumer mobile platform and in-store digital innovation initiatives.
Key areas of impact included:
Managing the mobile business P&L exceeding $500M in annual bookings, with mobile experiencing 800% year-over-year growth.
Leading the redesign of the Kohl’s mobile app and mobile web experience, improving the app rating from 2.5 to 4.5 stars in the App Store.
Expanding mobile payments from less than 1% to more than 25% of all transactions.
Overseeing development of applications across iPhone, iPad, Android, and mobile web platforms.
This work helped establish mobile as a core channel for customer engagement and digital retail growth.

mobile commerceP&L managementmobile app developmentdigital innovationProduct Management

Groupon

Discovery & Personalization Systems

May 2012 – Oct 2013 · 1 yr 5 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Led the development of personalization capabilities designed to improve how customers discover relevant offers across the marketplace.
Key areas of work included:
Leading the personalization initiative from ideation through launch.
Building large-scale user models and data-driven products to improve customer engagement and loyalty.
Developing applications for deal targeting, recommendations, and personalization to improve marketplace relevance.
Contributing to initiatives that drove 8% year-over-year revenue growth.
This work focused on applying data-driven approaches to improve customer discovery and engagement across a large marketplace platform.

personalization systemsdata-driven productscustomer engagementProduct Development

Netflix

Digital Movie Supply Chain Platform and Recommendation Systems

Dec 2011 – Jun 2012 · 6 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Led a team of architects and senior engineers responsible for key components of Netflix’s digital movie supply chain platform.
Areas of responsibility included:
Architecting systems responsible for movie content ingestion, content management, and validation across the platform.
Building infrastructure supporting the movie recommendation experience for customers.
Launching an improved recommendation algorithm that increased movie viewership by 3%.
This work focused on improving the reliability and intelligence of systems that manage and distribute digital content at scale.

digital supply chainrecommendation systemscontent managementSystem Architecture

Amazon

Mobile Messaging Platform and SMS APIs

Apr 2004 – Mar 2006 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Diego, California, United States

Worked on core messaging infrastructure within Qualcomm’s BREW mobile platform, developing APIs and features supporting SMS capabilities across mobile devices.
Key contributions included:
Developing an SMS API on the Qualcomm BREW platform used by mobile applications.
Building new functionality for the SMS platform supporting both CDMA and GSM networks.
Implementing messaging platform features using C.
This work focused on building foundational messaging capabilities for mobile devices and carrier networks

messaging infrastructureAPI developmentmobile platformsSoftware Development