Headline

CTO at SmartTerra | AI platforms for water utilities across cloud and on-prem | MLOps · Agentic AI · Kubernetes

About

Water utilities lose a big share of treated water before it reaches a tap. My job at SmartTerra is to help them find out where it goes. I'm the CTO. I run the engineering team and own how our software is designed and built: backend, data, ML, web and mobile. I joined in 2020 as an ML engineer, spent three years as a senior engineer leading full-stack work on the core platform, and became CTO in November 2024. Utilities and their field crews run on our web platform and mobile apps across 12+ cities in India and Southeast Asia. In January 2024 we won the WEF UpLink Zero Water Waste Challenge. What my team builds: → A multi-tenant web platform utilities use to run and analyse their networks → Mobile apps for field crews and for consumers → AquaBot, an agentic AI assistant: specialist agents that query live network data and documents to answer utilities' questions about their own network → Streaming pipelines for smart-meter data, plus leak and pipe risk analytics that create field tasks on their own → One deployment that runs on Azure, AWS or a client's own servers, with confidential computing to protect our models I'm also our Information Security Officer. I took SmartTerra through ISO 27001 certification and now own the programme that keeps us certified. We're a small team, so I'm still hands-on: I write code alongside the team every week and review most of what we ship. Happy to talk system design, Kubernetes across cloud and on-prem, or putting AI agents into production. Message me.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

notion

Work experience

Chief Technology Officer at SmartTerra, Nov 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 1 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, • Manage a small engineering team across ML, data, platform, web and mobile. I hire, set priorities, run sprints and releases, and still write code every week while reviewing and merging across all repos • Own system design and architecture for the platform: multi-tenant services, data pipelines, ML serving, and deployments that run on our cloud, client clouds or on-prem • Designed confidential-computing deployments on AKS so our models stay protected on client-hosted infrastructure • Run architecture reviews for new products and integrations, and make the build-or-buy calls on our stack • Shipped AquaBot, an agentic AI assistant where specialist agents query live network data and documents, keeping each client's data separate • Moved the data platform to streaming with high availability, replacing a batch sync that kept failing • Set up cluster autoscaling that cut cloud spend by ₹30–50k a month (about US$350–600) • Led SmartTerra to ISO 27001 certification as Information Security Officer. I wrote the policy set and the risk and control framework, ran the internal audit and took us through the external certification audit • Own application and infrastructure security across all products: regular penetration testing, access controls and background checks for new hires

Senior Software Engineer - AI/ML at SmartTerra, Oct 2021 - Oct 2024 · 3 yrs 1 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, • Lead full stack engineer on the core platform (1,100+ commits) • Managed a small engineering team: split up the work, reviewed code and mentored junior engineers • Built the web app and mobile app end to end: frontend, backend services and APIs • Built analytics features that turn sensor and network data into alerts and work orders for field teams • Took ML models from prototype to production, as scheduled batch jobs and as live APIs • Built interactive web dashboards, including geospatial views, for utility clients

Machine Learning Engineer at SmartTerra, Oct 2020 - Sep 2021 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, • Built demand-forecasting models for water networks • Classified unbilled and illegal connections at 75% recall, which helped utilities recover lost revenue • Built anomaly detection that learns from what field teams confirm • Defined the KPIs we still use for non-revenue water

Data Scientist at SupervisedLearning.com, Jul 2019 - May 2020 · 11 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, As a part of this role • Created data visualization graphics, translating complex data sets into comprehensive visual representations. • Presented data science findings to peers, illustrating progress made during various tasks. • Worked with Clients from Food Industry to help them with Data-Driven Decision Making. • Analysed students’ activity on the platform, chats in live classes and presence to have data-driven Mentorship for students. • Designed Content for a course of its own kind NLP 100 Hours. • Aided in training new personnel in use of Tableau and Natural Language Processing.

Wise Learner at SupervisedLearning.com, Jun 2019 - Aug 2019 · 3 mos, As a part of this role, I work on preparing data tales - the story of a data set carefully mined from the data using extensive exploratory data analysis, feature engineering and modelling. The entire work is documented, reviewed multiple times before it is published. My other responsibilities include reviewing and learning from other wise learners data tales. Apart from it, I take part in interactive live in-depth Super Talks.

Education

Bachelor’s Degree, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Lovely Professional University

Senior Secondary Certificate, Science, DAV Public School ,Balasore