Pankaj G. — Director of Engineering

Lead, mentor and inspire a group of highly experienced engineers. Articulate the company’s strategic and product vision to engineering teams, driving alignment, transparency, and inspiration for execution. I develop and execute roadmaps that bridge strategic intent with tactical delivery, ensuring measurable business outcomes. I define systems, processes and culture which works like an engine and make everyone around productive. Partner with the Product Managers to share product vision, creating the delivery roadmaps, and managing their execution across a complex set of internal and external dependencies. Influence senior stakeholders across the business to reach and maintain strategic and tactical alignment Lead by example by taking ownership, being proactive and collaborating Nurture, grow and develop engineering talent in the team and foster a great culture. Advocate of engineering leadership and technical quality. Ensure delivery by tracking team health metrics and KPIs, monitoring roadmap progress, identifying dependencies and and removing blockers I have successfully led the delivery of a self-service platform that improved service reliability from 99.00% to 99.99% and reduced deployment cycles from months to days, transforming operational agility and customer experience. Additionally, I have launched multiple organization-wide platforms from proof of concept to production, empowering 10,000+ developers and creating unified impact across the company. A technically strong, strategic leader, I create business value by defining clear strategies, ensuring accountability, and fostering seamless collaboration across product, architecture, and engineering. On the people leadership side, I design robust career progression frameworks emphasizing technical excellence, ownership, and growth. I mentor and guide architects, principal engineers, managers, and vendor teams to achieve organizational goals through clarity, empowerment, and accountability. From a project delivery perspective, I specialize in solving real business problems—translating vision into actionable roadmaps, defining goals. I regularly present progress, strategy, and impact to executive leadership to ensure alignment and visibility. I make engineering org better with a focus on more impactful things, higher consistency with fewer issues, shape engineering works and redesigned how people review and test code which eliminate wastes. - I don't let mediocracy slide in. - I shape attitude around ownership. - I confront people who resists standards.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS-focused engineering leader with expertise in data and machine learning platforms.

Location: Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

Experience: 21 yrs 3 mos

Skills

Engineering Leadership
Data Engineering
Reliability Engineering
Devops
Team Management
Software Development
Web Development

Career Highlights

Improved service reliability from 99.00% to 99.99%
Reduced deployment cycles from months to days
Empowered over 10,000 developers with unified platforms

Work Experience

Booking.com

Sr. Engineering Manager Data and Machine Learning Platform (3 yrs 6 mos)

Apple

ML and Data Reliability - Engineering Manager (8 mos)

Broadcom

Principal Engineer Platform Engineering (9 yrs 6 mos)

NetApp

Engineering Manager Platform (5 yrs 8 mos)

Synopsys

Senior Software Engineer Automation (1 yr 11 mos)

Education

PGDIT at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Bachelor's degree at Maharshi Dayanand University

Pankaj G.

Director of Engineering

Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India21 yrs 3 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

Improved service reliability from 99.00% to 99.99%
Reduced deployment cycles from months to days
Empowered over 10,000 developers with unified platforms

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS-focused engineering leader with expertise in data and machine learning platforms.

Contact

pankaj.gupta14us@gmail.com LinkedIn

Skills

Core Skills

Engineering LeadershipData EngineeringReliability EngineeringDevopsTeam ManagementSoftware DevelopmentWeb Development

Other Skills

Managing ManagersDistributed SystemsCloud ComputingKubernetesFlinkKafkaDirector levelWeb ServicesProduct DeliveryApplication ArchitectureStrategic InitiativesCritical ThinkingUptimeSoftware Product ManagementTechnical Vision

About

Experience

21 yrs 3 mos

Total Experience

Average Tenure

3 yrs 6 mos

Current Experience

Booking.com

Sr. Engineering Manager Data and Machine Learning Platform

Dec 2022 – Present · 3 yrs 6 mos · Netherlands · Hybrid

Hands on impact driven Engineering Leader with deep experience managing multiple Agile teams in data domain. I simplify the complex concept to make it easy for people to brainstorm with clarity. I do own the ambiguity and drive clarity. I drive a culture of innovation and bring small improvement everyday. I specialise in translating business vision into actionable engineering roadmaps that deliver measurable outcomes, not just output.
I’ve led large-scale modernisation efforts that improved system reliability, reduced operational cost, and accelerated data freshness (e.g., 30% lower storage cost and data latency improved from 24 hours to 2 hours).
Change Management for the large engineering organisation. Develop Psychological Safety and Engineering Thinking.
My focus areas include:
Reliability Engineering: Ensuring scalability, performance, and operational excellence across critical machine learning training and inference workloads.
Currently focussed on streaming data from transaction store like MySQL. Working on Flink, Kafka with data evaluation in HA, multi-region environment. Making sure of high consistency, dedupe, idempotent processing, and reproducibility for batch and streaming.
Strategic Leadership: Defining and articulating company and product vision, driving alignment, and inspiring teams of managers and principal engineers.
Architecture & Delivery: Building secure, compliant, API-first systems that enable modular frontend and backend development.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Partnering with business stakeholders to balance compliance, innovation, and tech debt reduction.
Backend: REST API Java, Python, GoLang.
Data & ML: Big Data & Data Engineering, GenAI, ML Ops using Airflow, Snowflake.
Cloud: AWS, GCP
Containers: Kubernetes (Stateful and Stateless)
I’m passionate about leading teams that combine technical depth with business clarity, driving both reliability and innovation at scale.

Managing ManagersDistributed SystemsReliability EngineeringData EngineeringCloud ComputingKubernetes+1

Apple

ML and Data Reliability - Engineering Manager

Mar 2022 – Nov 2022 · 8 mos · Bangalore Urban · Hybrid

Building Reliability for Data migrations at scale.
Building ML platform for parallel and distributed training (GPU clusters), sharding data for lustreFX, scheduling using slurm and global & phased deployments using k8s for inference

KubernetesDirector levelEngineering LeadershipData Engineering

Broadcom

Principal Engineer Platform Engineering

Sep 2012 – Mar 2022 · 9 yrs 6 mos · Bangalore · On-site

Certified Kubernetes Application Developer - CKAD-1900-002262-0100
Certified Kubernetes Administrator - CKA - CKA-2000-005959-0100
Certified AWS Solutions Architect - AWS-ASA-14816
Certified AWS Sysops Administrator - AWS-ASA-14889
Key Responsibility: Good knowledge of FedRamp security requirements and actively participated for compliance. Accountable for developing DevOps and SRE practices around organisation.
Managing Data at scale to be used by Machine Learning ecosystem.
Define Observability around cloud applications (logging, monitoring-alerting) around ML model (ML Ops).
High Performance Computing, LSF and low level kernel troubleshooting using eBPF and Kubernetes.
Build system: Makefiles and automation.
Testing: Creating various environments like pre-prod, dev, staging, prod, and chaos engineering on those environments.
Deployment: Working with business groups for monolithic to microservice architecture patterns in distributed systems and their design using cloud/Kubernetes constructs.
Application Development:
Writing REST API using Python FLASK (SQLAlchemy, Marshmallow) and Reactjs, Groovy Library (JenkinsFile), Helm Charts (GitOps), Terraform, GoLang (MVC) and Java based Applications for infrastructure automation.
Drive cloud-native application architecture (SaaS) and patterns to enable application migration and reference architecture.
Partner with Product, presale, engineering teams, SRE's, to engineer services on both private and public cloud platforms. (Using Terraform/Ansible etc.)
Drive the next-generation hybrid cloud adoption strategy and execution.
Drive best-in-class customer experience on the cloud platform.
Orchestration Tools: Terraform, Ansible. Writing Ansible playbooks, role and module (using python).
Programming: Python (Expert Level), Java.
Front end Programming: Bootstrap (CSS, JavaScript, and HTML), React, Jinja2 (Templating).

Web ServicesDistributed SystemsDevOpsData Engineering

Netapp

Engineering Manager Platform

Jan 2007 – Sep 2012 · 5 yrs 8 mos · NetApp · Hybrid

Hiring, Nurturing, Retaining, and breeding talent. Maintain transparency and define clear goals.
Uplift and train team, manage stakeholders, and be most efficient.
Inspiring the team, having a clear vision and mission, Supporting individuals with their development goals, and defining purpose.

Distributed SystemsProduct DeliveryEngineering LeadershipTeam Management