Pardon the verbosity, I'm working on a condensed version!
Jan 16th, 2016, was the first day I stepped into the software engineering world. During my undergraduate studies, I realized Electronics wasn't my calling and started exploring opportunities in data science. A few months earlier, I'd taken a course called “Analytics Edge” by MIT on Edx, which piqued my interest in the field. Completing my first-ever programming assignments left me with a feeling of newfound power.
I was fortunate to be offered an internship at VIMANA, where I joined the data science team. The decision was primarily influenced by Alex, the then data science lead, who was impressed by my energy and enthusiasm. Despite my lack of a formal CS background, he decided to take a chance on me. Since then, Alex has been my mentor, and I owe much of my success to him.
While working on large datasets collected from machines at VIMANA, I developed a fascination towards the engineering side of things built to collect and analyze these massive amounts of data in realtime. Athulan, VIMANA's CTO & Founder, was instrumental in supporting me in transitioning to a backend engineering role.
I started writing APIs, understanding databases and building data pipelines, diving deep into stream processing. I got an opportunity to work on Enrich, a real time stream processing engine which was our flagship product and very soon, given it was a small team, I was one of two owners of all of the data pipeline that handled 200k events every minute. The other lead Rakesh and I developed an excellent rapport, solving problems together with the help of our chief architect Barry
I made my decision to continue in this field after this experience and decided to pursue an online masters at Georgia Tech as I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to learn by being part of a company that was using bleeding edge tech to solve actual production problems.
In 2019, we got an incredible opportunity to build the data backend for a connected vehicles company. We had to scale our systems 30x and transform our data pipeline built for manufacturing to a generic data platform. Within a few months, we had the production system up which went on to handle 12 million events per minute streaming live from vehicles on the ground. Overcoming the technical challenges involved in this transformation was immensely rewarding and pushed me to grow both technically and professionally.
In 2021, there was an opportunity to build a proof of concept for a high throughput system in the testing and measurement domain for a company called HBK. We successfully completed the POC and in a surprising turn of events, HBK decided to acquire VIMANA.
Although joining HBK provided invaluable experience and insight into working within a larger corporate structure, I realized that my passion for innovation and the agile environment of startups was calling me back. After much consideration, I decided to leave HBK to pursue new opportunities where I could have a more direct impact and continue to thrive in a fast-paced, innovative setting.
When I was offered the opportunity to lead the engineering team at a fitness startup for a wearable + mobile application based product, I jumped at the chance. I feel that I'm still in the investment phase of my career. That means putting myself in situations which are new to me, which challenge me and where I can learn the most. To lead a team of engineers and building a product from scratch, to be able to make a ton of decisions and deliver a product that is directly in the hands of an end user was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.
About 2 years into this role now, we have a product that is truly helping users become fit and healthy and that satisfaction of building something that can positively impact the well being of an individual is something I cherish. Hoping more good things are in store for us at NETRIN.
Education
