Jul 2020 – Dec 2023 · 3 yrs 5 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• Strategic Leadership & Site Expansion- Spearheaded India's Engineering, Infrastructure, and Operations as the Site Leader, collaborating with US leaders and peers to strategize and scale the India site
• ▪ Initiate the development of innovative retail capabilities and fostered a "one-target" culture, positioning India as an extended HQ
• ▪ Innovation & Patent- Establish retail business capabilities in computer vision, including the setup of a hardware lab that led to the generation of over 12 patents, contributing to pioneering advancements in the field and solving very complex retail, fraud and supply chain problems
• ▪ Product development & Turnaround- Engineer turnaround in product development and management for devices across retail stores, headquarters, and distribution centers, optimizing product performance and operational efficiency
• ▪ Site Leadership & cross collaboration- Lead site operations encompassing Cloud, Reliability, Finance, Retail Stability, and IT Operations
• ▪ Build and expand teams, mature processes, develop strategic priorities, integrate knowledge, and promote local talent and culture

Jan 2017 – Mar 2020 · 3 yrs 2 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• Handpicked to provide strategic leadership and align the infrastructure technology vision with the business strategy while balancing organizational considerations, current technology architecture, business priorities, and operational processes. Made contribution to review and strategy meetings on business health, opportunities, investments. Established diverse software to hardware to the cloud security team.
• Span of control : As engineering head for central platforms and functions reporting to the CEO, I lead scale platforms (customer identity, supply, connectivity), product engineering platforms, app delivery, caching services, IaaS (traffic shaping, logging @ 15M logs/sec, metrics, performance test & 1-click environments), PaaS (streaming @ 25k eps, data bus, segmentation and marketing analytics), SRE / DevOps, data and analytics/ML platforms, central analytics services, information security, release and build, performance test engineering.
• I was overseeing architect function on platformization opportunities, rewrite legacy services, stability / scale and metrics based operations, stack design and architecture, disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
• Some of key accomplishments include
• Built dozen + multitenant platforms that replaced high number of legacy product engineering services.
• Migrated from AWS opswork to inhouse Orchestrator and moving 700+ stateless application to Mesos/marathon-based system. Stateful applications(spark, flink, yarn) on Kubernetes.
• Migrated and build a dual cloud Infrastructure on AWS and Azure running on homegrown PaaS
• Evolved & worked on structuring the Engineering org, SSDLC, branding - hackathons, tech presentations, patent filing, and open source contributions
• Built a new analytical platform based on Azure data lake. scale of 10k+ CPU core, 5 PB of data. 6x -15x improvement in execution time.
• Build Customer data platform that enabled CLM and personalization based on 20 + DS/ML models like Churn, LTV etc.

Sep 2014 – Jan 2017 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Banglore

• Provided thought leadership and turned around a largely operations unit, clearing tech debt, and building self-serve engineering and analytic platforms, with a much nimble team. Build modular and hugely scalable data centers. Developed and managed the technical roadmap from solution prototype to launch. Successfully led the first attempt to run small scale ad-serving on AWS cloud.
• Built an identity of PIE which was a congregation of dispersed functions and made it central to business needs. Infra alone led to 5-5-6% uptick in business transactions by plugging latency gaps.
• Architected new data centres for 100 Billion ad-requests/day scale. Shepherded the production environment with a scale of 2 trillion Ads per year, 250K requests/sec for 1.7+ billion mobile users , 100 TB databases, bigdata clusters of 6PB, ingesting 3 Trillion events/day.
• Executive responsibilities to run technology affairs including building technology products, running production, global compliance, tech P&L, technology architecture. Reduced outages and business change delivery time
• Part of the executive solution team for China business that led its business growth and contributed to the overall revenue.
• Created nimble teams. Developed technology products boosting productivity, scale and velocity of the organisation.
• Expanded geographical distributed big data system into a near realtime streaming services and executive sponsor for Unified Analytics Platform.

Dec 2007 – Sep 2014 · 6 yrs 9 mos · Gurugram, Haryana, India

• Assistant Vice President- Technical Operations - Dec 2007 to April 2012
• Director - Technical Operations - April 2012 to April 2013
• Led key organization-wide strategic initiatives encompassing paid marketing, digital campaigns, personalization leveraging NRT BigData Platform, hybrid Cloud hosting. Span included Data centers, DevOps, DBA, performance, networking, operations, BI, data scientists. Served as the CDO and CIO, managing global relationships with key vendors, consultants, licenses, and acquisitions.
• Increased productivity through application development and deployment, re-engineered marketing, back office, Contracting, financial, compliance, and datacenter systems.
• Part of the leadership team that envisioned the center of excellence, broaden organization-wide business goals and its architecture and implementation.
• Drove operating costs down while maintaining service levels through strict budgetary control and effective vendor management to ensure competitive pricing.
• Design, build and operation of makemytirp.com (1 Gbps, 10M page views/day). Active-Active multi datacenter.
• Data centers based on private cloud, clustered OLTP, centrally managed updates and server provisioning. 8 tier security, PCI-DSS, SOX.
• Customized real-time and inline monitoring tools over open source stack covering 6M checks/day.
• Leverage Big Data analytics towards personalization. BI Initiatives include SEM and paid marketing optimization and bidding. Built data hub for reporting, dashboard needs through Qlikview.
• Chief consultant on technology to executive team.
• https://kharb.me/?page_id=39
• https://kharb.me/?page_id=11
• https://kharb.me/?page_id=116

Oct 2004 – Oct 2007 · 3 yrs

• Setup Remote Infrastructure India setup. Team of 32 people including DBA, Network Engineers, System Admins and Tech Support in multi-geography.
• Java stack infra that supported 32 Million page views/day, 48 million products, 350 million images, 130 million page caching, 200M display ads/day.
• Muti geo team to build DR capability by setting up the second datacenter at Equinox.
• Introduced custom kernel. MySQL DB optimizations and deploying mysql clusters, cyclic replications.
• Member of “Architecture Desk”. Responsible for research, evaluation, and implementation of all key architecture changes. Tight interaction with Engineering team, operational feedback.
• Developed emergency handling systems/tools and site outage management, incident management, help desk management, change control management
• Live site uptime increased from 99.99% to 99.995%. Reduced ops loss from $77k/month in 2004 to $1.2k/month through business aligned SLA’s.
• Introduced xen based virtualization, web caching for crawlers that reduced hardware cost by $450k/annum..
• Streamlined Config and change/release management. Reduced ops mistakes from 9.2/week in 2004 to 0.34/week in 2007.
• Distributed/failover monitoring for 20k+ monitoring points using custom built nagios, SNMP traps, rrdtools, event handlers. Developed configuration management and asset tracking tool.

Jan 2004 – Jan 2004 · 0 mo

• SetUp India Operations in record 30 days and migration of all Support activities in 60 days flat.
• Managing Outsourcing contract, business and technology handovers.
• Fully responsible to manage and maintain all data Centre operations for the site www.netdoctor.co.uk and Internal IT, leading 4 contractual employees.
• Currently taken over by Kring Technologies, a multi domain service industry.

Apr 2002 – Jan 2004 · 1 yr 9 mos

• From April 2002-Mar 2004- Manager Systems
• Was heading their Software Development wing in Hartron IT complex in Gurgaon. Work was based on Embedded systems based on 8051 microcontrollers on Atmel.
• Providing Open source solutions on mail, proxies, LAN, Apache, php, file servers and Corporate training to customers.
• From Aug 1999- May 2001, worked as Systems Engineer(Part-time)
• Profile included managing internal LAN, managing IT Labs, and teaching assignments, Content generation.

Jul 2001 – Mar 2002 · 8 mos · Pune

• Worked on Embedded systems and taking up training assignments.

Aug 1998 – Apr 1999 · 8 mos · New Delhi

• Worked in Mainframe Maintenance project of Ingram Micro for Y2K fixations

Aug 1995 – Mar 1998 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Faridabad

• Setup a India Center for Seat Belt and safety systems for Allied Signals in a JV with Jay Bharat Maruti.