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Athitya Kumar

Staff Software Engineer | Builder Culture & Open-Source Community Lead @ Intuit | IIT Kharagpur Alumnus | Creator of ColorLS (5k+ ⭐)

Bengaluru

7+ years of work experience

Intuit
Feb 20251 yr 7 mosPresent

Bengaluru

Leading Data Observability, AI-augmented data quality, and cross-functional engineering at Intuit. I focus on solving 0→1 architectural ambiguities, driving alignment, and building systems that protect customer trust and revenue at scale. 🏆 Awards & Recognition • Won Intuit India Annual Award for FY25 📡 Data Observability & Architecture • Golden Signals: Architected Intuit’s first unified observability standard for the Data ecosystem. Brought 26K pipeline assets under coverage (from 0 baseline) and routed 153 season-critical assets to incident management. • Cross-Org Alignment: Drove consensus across 12+ teams. Golden Signals is now the default observability contract for new pipelines (~300 TPS at <100ms P99 latency). 🛡️ Reliability & Business Impact • Marketing Dashboards: Delivered campaign health visibility across 2 BUs (CG & GBSG) via a novel cross-observer job-chaining architecture. Patent Filed: 2614408US. • Peak Season: Protected revenue by reducing P1/P2 data incidents from 20+ (FY25) to ZERO (FY26). Reduced cross-hop parity MTTD by 3×. Caught an eventing bug, saving personalization for 18K customers. 🤖 AI Innovation & Agentic DQ • LLM Anomaly Detection: Designed Claude Opus-powered anomaly detection with natural-language explainability and steward feedback loops. • Agentic Platforms: Built an MCP-based DQ platform for Intuit's Plugin Registry, enabling 3× faster adoption of composable DQ tools. • AI Architecture: Built an AI knowledge base, accelerating design velocity by 3×. 🤝 Leadership & Execution • Nebula UAT: Led cross-boundary integration testing across 10+ teams. Designed 230+ tests, resolving 50+ critical issues for GA. • Palantir Foundry Track: Delivered the Foundry Onboarding Platform, enabling $24M in Year 1 value ($4M efficiency + $20M new revenue potential). • FinOps: Drove cluster right-sizing for ~$1M in annualized AWS/Databricks savings.
Intuit
Aug 20222 yrs 6 mosJan 2025

Bengaluru

Transitioned internally to drive critical engineering initiatives across Intuit's Batch Processing Platform (BPP) and Data Lineage charters. My core focus was scaling platform resilience, championing open-source/inner-source adoption, and enabling clean, reliable data to be produced for critical use-cases. 🏆 Awards & Patents • US Patent Issued: #11,468,642 • Intuit India SuperStar Award (FY24.Q2): Recognized for exceptional platform delivery. 🌐 Data Lineage & Clean Data Architecture • Lineage Architecture: Designed an event-driven, real-time lineage capture mechanism, leading the team to deliver 3 SDKs and 1 API. Driven by extensive documentation and monitoring setups, this enabled 20+ internal teams to seamlessly adopt and publish lineage. • Enterprise Scale & OSS: Led inner-source SDK adoption across 3 major data platforms (UIP, BPP, Superglue) and actively contributed upstream to the OpenLineage (OSS) community. • Cross-Geo Impact: Partnered globally with Data Quality and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams to build Data Reliability on top of Lineage, safeguarding high-stakes marketing campaigns. ⚙️ Platform Engineering (Batch Processing Platform) • FinOps & Cloud Optimization: Led the AWS EMR Runtime for BPP, driving gp3 EBS adoption that boosted performance and cut EMR costs by 10%—delivering ~$1.5M in annualized savings. • Performance Tuning: Slashed microservice CPU utilization by ~70% via systematic DB query debugging and optimization. 🤝 Leadership & Stakeholder Management • Team Building: Grew, onboarded, and actively led a 4-person contractor team, directing their efforts on OpEx tracks to maximize platform resilience. • Adoption & Strategy: Drove UIP-BPP OpMechs. Collaborated closely with customers to understand use cases, groomed and prioritized feature requests for timely delivery, and expanded BPP adoption across the Data Insights org.
Intuit
Feb 20211 yr 6 mosJul 2022

Bangalore

Stepped up to lead critical execution tracks within Intuit's Unified Ingestion Platform (UIP). My work centered on driving operational excellence, leading complex platform-to-platform migrations, and radically improving the developer experience through self-serve automation. 🏆 Awards & Recognition • Won Intuit India SuperStar Award (FY22.Q2) 🛠️ Operational Excellence & Automation • Self-Healing Infrastructure: Kickstarted and designed an extensible self-healing module for UIP. This automation successfully auto-resolves multiple alert types, significantly reducing MTTD/MTTR, eliminating on-call toil, and boosting overall developer productivity. 💻 Full-Stack & Developer Experience • Self-Serve Platform Revamp: Drove the full-stack revamp of UIP's self-serve experience. By streamlining user workflows, introducing self-serve automation, establishing Cypress integration testing, and authoring tech maturity documentation, I improved velocity of new onboardings by 5×. ⚙️ Platform Architecture & Migrations • Legacy-to-BPP Migration: Led the design and execution of migrating UIP Batch Ingestion jobs from a legacy scheduler to Intuit's Batch Processing Platform (BPP). Automated orchestration for new onboardings via BPP APIs and proactively bridged gaps in the platform-on-platform architecture. • SOX Compliance & Inner-Sourcing: Spearheaded the SOX compliance track for batch ingestion (Data Parity & Repair). Built and inner-sourced a shared sox-cli library, enabling 10+ Intuit platform teams to easily integrate auditing into their CI/CD pipelines. 🗄️ Data Lake & Enterprise Initiatives • Multi-Source Sharded Ingestion: Led cross-module efforts to enable simultaneous data ingestion from both Oracle and Postgres sharded sources into the Data Lake. This capability was a key pillar of an Intuit-wide initiative allowing QuickBooks data to safely transition between database engines, saving Oracle licensing cost.
Intuit India
May 20183 mosJul 2018

Bengaluru

Completed a high-impact internship focused on system modernization and cost optimization through the strategic adoption of open-source technologies. 🛠️ Reverse Engineering & Modernization • Enterprise Tool Replacement: Successfully reverse-engineered a high-cost, proprietary enterprise application (Glance), unpacking its core capabilities to rebuild the system using robust open-source solutions (TogetherJS). 💡 Business Impact & UX • Cost Optimization: Eliminated expensive licensing dependencies, driving direct cost savings for the organization. • Customer Experience: Enhanced the overall user experience by customizing the open-source TogetherJS to have more Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to deliver a more tailored, efficient, and user-centric product.
Google
May 20173 mosJul 2017

Ruby Science Foundation

Selected for the highly competitive Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program to contribute to the open-source Ruby Data Science (SciRuby) ecosystem. 💎 Open-Source Ruby Development • Developed the daru-io Gem: Architected, developed, and published the daru-io Ruby gem from scratch to extend the capabilities of the daru (Data Analysis in RUby) library. • Data I/O Architecture: Engineered a robust I/O connector integration that seamlessly supports the import and export of data between top 7 frequently-used external sources/sinks and Daru DataFrames. • Community Impact: Significantly enhanced the data engineering capabilities within the Ruby ecosystem, empowering developers to easily manipulate and transport diverse data formats. 🔗 Project Link: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#5380363785338880
Kharagpur Winter of Code 2016
Dec 20162 mosJan 2017

IIT Kharagpur

Actively mentored multiple student members for 7 different projects within the 1-month KWoC open-source contribution fest held by Kharagpur Open Source Society (KOSS).
MetaKGP
Jan 20161 yr 7 mosJul 2017

IIT Kharagpur

Contributed as a core developer to Metakgp, IIT Kharagpur's student-run open-source community. Focused on building utility-driven applications, automation scripts, and aggregators to solve day-to-day campus challenges for the student body. 🛠️ Campus Utility & Automation Tools • GYFT (Timetable Automation): Engineered a widely adopted utility that securely authenticates into the university's ERP portal, parsing complex academic schedules and automatically syncing them to students' Google Calendars. • Naarad (Feed Aggregator): Developed a targeted social media aggregation tool that curated and centralized news, posts, and updates specific to the IIT Kharagpur ecosystem from Facebook. • MFQP (Academic Archive): Built and maintained a centralized database and retrieval tool for previous years' academic question papers, significantly improving study resource accessibility for students across the university.
GitHub
@athityakumar

Education

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Bachelor of Technology (BTech) & Master of Technology (MTech), Mechanical Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

20145 yrs2019
Chettinad Vidyashram

High School, Computer Science stream

Chettinad Vidyashram

20122 yrs2014

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Headline

Staff Software Engineer | Builder Culture & Open-Source Community Lead @ Intuit | IIT Kharagpur Alumnus | Creator of ColorLS (5k+ ⭐)

About

Hi there! I'm a 2019 IIT Kharagpur grad currently building great products at Intuit India. I consider myself a professional of many hats—both technical and creative—and I love bringing all of these sides to my work. Here is a quick look at what makes me tick: 💻 The Developer & Scripter I am a full-stack developer who loves building responsive, user-centric applications. While my sweet spot often involves Java, GoLang, Ruby on Rails or Python, I enjoy navigating the ever-evolving world of JavaScript frameworks (even if keeping up with them keeps me on my toes!). Beyond web development, I’m deeply interested in writing functional scripts that solve real problems. You'll often find me exploring Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Image Processing, and Web Scraping. I am a big believer in the open-source community, and I keep many of my projects public on GitHub. ✍️ The Writer (a.k.a "Vibe") I have a deep appreciation for the English language and love clear, meticulous communication (I am always happy to be the designated proofreader for team documents!). I also enjoy putting my thoughts into words through blogging, where I write under the pen name "Vibe." ☕ The Human To fuel all the coding and writing, I run on a healthy appreciation for good coffee. When I am completely off the clock, I’m usually doing one of three things to unwind: playing a chess match, practicing as a Carnatic vocalist, or geeking out over a great TV series / Anime (always happy to debate the best moments of Breaking Bad or Naruto). I'm always open to growing my network. Let's chat!

Location

Bengaluru

Work experience

Staff Software Engineer at Intuit, Feb 2025 - Present · 1 yr 7 mos, Bengaluru, Leading Data Observability, AI-augmented data quality, and cross-functional engineering at Intuit. I focus on solving 0→1 architectural ambiguities, driving alignment, and building systems that protect customer trust and revenue at scale. 🏆 Awards & Recognition • Won Intuit India Annual Award for FY25 📡 Data Observability & Architecture • Golden Signals: Architected Intuit’s first unified observability standard for the Data ecosystem. Brought 26K pipeline assets under coverage (from 0 baseline) and routed 153 season-critical assets to incident management. • Cross-Org Alignment: Drove consensus across 12+ teams. Golden Signals is now the default observability contract for new pipelines (~300 TPS at <100ms P99 latency). 🛡️ Reliability & Business Impact • Marketing Dashboards: Delivered campaign health visibility across 2 BUs (CG & GBSG) via a novel cross-observer job-chaining architecture. Patent Filed: 2614408US. • Peak Season: Protected revenue by reducing P1/P2 data incidents from 20+ (FY25) to ZERO (FY26). Reduced cross-hop parity MTTD by 3×. Caught an eventing bug, saving personalization for 18K customers. 🤖 AI Innovation & Agentic DQ • LLM Anomaly Detection: Designed Claude Opus-powered anomaly detection with natural-language explainability and steward feedback loops. • Agentic Platforms: Built an MCP-based DQ platform for Intuit's Plugin Registry, enabling 3× faster adoption of composable DQ tools. • AI Architecture: Built an AI knowledge base, accelerating design velocity by 3×. 🤝 Leadership & Execution • Nebula UAT: Led cross-boundary integration testing across 10+ teams. Designed 230+ tests, resolving 50+ critical issues for GA. • Palantir Foundry Track: Delivered the Foundry Onboarding Platform, enabling $24M in Year 1 value ($4M efficiency + $20M new revenue potential). • FinOps: Drove cluster right-sizing for ~$1M in annualized AWS/Databricks savings.

Senior Software Engineer at Intuit, Aug 2022 - Jan 2025 · 2 yrs 6 mos, Bengaluru, Transitioned internally to drive critical engineering initiatives across Intuit's Batch Processing Platform (BPP) and Data Lineage charters. My core focus was scaling platform resilience, championing open-source/inner-source adoption, and enabling clean, reliable data to be produced for critical use-cases. 🏆 Awards & Patents • US Patent Issued: #11,468,642 • Intuit India SuperStar Award (FY24.Q2): Recognized for exceptional platform delivery. 🌐 Data Lineage & Clean Data Architecture • Lineage Architecture: Designed an event-driven, real-time lineage capture mechanism, leading the team to deliver 3 SDKs and 1 API. Driven by extensive documentation and monitoring setups, this enabled 20+ internal teams to seamlessly adopt and publish lineage. • Enterprise Scale & OSS: Led inner-source SDK adoption across 3 major data platforms (UIP, BPP, Superglue) and actively contributed upstream to the OpenLineage (OSS) community. • Cross-Geo Impact: Partnered globally with Data Quality and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams to build Data Reliability on top of Lineage, safeguarding high-stakes marketing campaigns. ⚙️ Platform Engineering (Batch Processing Platform) • FinOps & Cloud Optimization: Led the AWS EMR Runtime for BPP, driving gp3 EBS adoption that boosted performance and cut EMR costs by 10%—delivering ~$1.5M in annualized savings. • Performance Tuning: Slashed microservice CPU utilization by ~70% via systematic DB query debugging and optimization. 🤝 Leadership & Stakeholder Management • Team Building: Grew, onboarded, and actively led a 4-person contractor team, directing their efforts on OpEx tracks to maximize platform resilience. • Adoption & Strategy: Drove UIP-BPP OpMechs. Collaborated closely with customers to understand use cases, groomed and prioritized feature requests for timely delivery, and expanded BPP adoption across the Data Insights org.

Software Engineer - 2 at Intuit, Feb 2021 - Jul 2022 · 1 yr 6 mos, Bangalore, Stepped up to lead critical execution tracks within Intuit's Unified Ingestion Platform (UIP). My work centered on driving operational excellence, leading complex platform-to-platform migrations, and radically improving the developer experience through self-serve automation. 🏆 Awards & Recognition • Won Intuit India SuperStar Award (FY22.Q2) 🛠️ Operational Excellence & Automation • Self-Healing Infrastructure: Kickstarted and designed an extensible self-healing module for UIP. This automation successfully auto-resolves multiple alert types, significantly reducing MTTD/MTTR, eliminating on-call toil, and boosting overall developer productivity. 💻 Full-Stack & Developer Experience • Self-Serve Platform Revamp: Drove the full-stack revamp of UIP's self-serve experience. By streamlining user workflows, introducing self-serve automation, establishing Cypress integration testing, and authoring tech maturity documentation, I improved velocity of new onboardings by 5×. ⚙️ Platform Architecture & Migrations • Legacy-to-BPP Migration: Led the design and execution of migrating UIP Batch Ingestion jobs from a legacy scheduler to Intuit's Batch Processing Platform (BPP). Automated orchestration for new onboardings via BPP APIs and proactively bridged gaps in the platform-on-platform architecture. • SOX Compliance & Inner-Sourcing: Spearheaded the SOX compliance track for batch ingestion (Data Parity & Repair). Built and inner-sourced a shared sox-cli library, enabling 10+ Intuit platform teams to easily integrate auditing into their CI/CD pipelines. 🗄️ Data Lake & Enterprise Initiatives • Multi-Source Sharded Ingestion: Led cross-module efforts to enable simultaneous data ingestion from both Oracle and Postgres sharded sources into the Data Lake. This capability was a key pillar of an Intuit-wide initiative allowing QuickBooks data to safely transition between database engines, saving Oracle licensing cost.

Software Engineering Intern at Intuit India, May 2018 - Jul 2018 · 3 mos, Bengaluru, Completed a high-impact internship focused on system modernization and cost optimization through the strategic adoption of open-source technologies. 🛠️ Reverse Engineering & Modernization • Enterprise Tool Replacement: Successfully reverse-engineered a high-cost, proprietary enterprise application (Glance), unpacking its core capabilities to rebuild the system using robust open-source solutions (TogetherJS). 💡 Business Impact & UX • Cost Optimization: Eliminated expensive licensing dependencies, driving direct cost savings for the organization. • Customer Experience: Enhanced the overall user experience by customizing the open-source TogetherJS to have more Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to deliver a more tailored, efficient, and user-centric product.

Google Summer of Code - Student Member at Google, May 2017 - Jul 2017 · 3 mos, Ruby Science Foundation, Selected for the highly competitive Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program to contribute to the open-source Ruby Data Science (SciRuby) ecosystem. 💎 Open-Source Ruby Development • Developed the daru-io Gem: Architected, developed, and published the daru-io Ruby gem from scratch to extend the capabilities of the daru (Data Analysis in RUby) library. • Data I/O Architecture: Engineered a robust I/O connector integration that seamlessly supports the import and export of data between top 7 frequently-used external sources/sinks and Daru DataFrames. • Community Impact: Significantly enhanced the data engineering capabilities within the Ruby ecosystem, empowering developers to easily manipulate and transport diverse data formats. 🔗 Project Link: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#5380363785338880

Mentor at Kharagpur Winter of Code 2016, Dec 2016 - Jan 2017 · 2 mos, IIT Kharagpur, Actively mentored multiple student members for 7 different projects within the 1-month KWoC open-source contribution fest held by Kharagpur Open Source Society (KOSS).

Software Developer at MetaKGP, Jan 2016 - Jul 2017 · 1 yr 7 mos, IIT Kharagpur, Contributed as a core developer to Metakgp, IIT Kharagpur's student-run open-source community. Focused on building utility-driven applications, automation scripts, and aggregators to solve day-to-day campus challenges for the student body. 🛠️ Campus Utility & Automation Tools • GYFT (Timetable Automation): Engineered a widely adopted utility that securely authenticates into the university's ERP portal, parsing complex academic schedules and automatically syncing them to students' Google Calendars. • Naarad (Feed Aggregator): Developed a targeted social media aggregation tool that curated and centralized news, posts, and updates specific to the IIT Kharagpur ecosystem from Facebook. • MFQP (Academic Archive): Built and maintained a centralized database and retrieval tool for previous years' academic question papers, significantly improving study resource accessibility for students across the university.

Education

Bachelor of Technology (BTech) & Master of Technology (MTech), Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

High School, Computer Science stream, Chettinad Vidyashram

Public links

github: https://github.com/athityakumar