Headline

Head of Engineering (SVP) | 60-member Orgs | ₹500Cr GMV | AI Systems that Ship to Production | Retail · Commerce · Insurance · SaaS

About

Engineering executive with nearly 20 years of experience building large-scale commerce, insurance and enterprise platforms, and delivering AI products that create measurable business outcomes. Currently leading a 60-member Engineering, Product and Data organization at DriveX, India's fastest-growing two-wheeler commerce platform (₹500Cr monthly GMV), responsible for technology strategy across Marketplace, Auctions, Refurbishment, Customer Experience and AI initiatives. Previously served as Director of Engineering at Acko, where I led Claims, Policy and Post-Purchase Engineering across Auto, Health and Life Insurance, and launched Acko Garage from inception to EBITDA-positive operations in just 18 months. Over the past few years I've focused on building production AI systems that solve operational problems rather than AI demonstrations. Some examples include: • Built a multilingual Voice AI platform (English, Kannada and Tamil) that increased low-intent lead conversion from 2% to 30%. • Built an AI Sales Intelligence platform that nearly doubled Acceptance-to-Visit conversion from ~16% to ~30%. • Built a Computer Vision platform that automated 80% of vehicle listing quality validation. • Built a Conversational Commerce platform that processed 40,000+ bids and generated ₹7Cr in topline revenue. • Led operational automation initiatives that improved work-order accuracy from 19% to 82%. My focus is building engineering organizations that ship business outcomes — through strong technical platforms, pragmatic AI adoption, and leaders who scale with the business. I work best at the intersection of engineering, AI and product strategy, in commerce, retail, BFSI, mobility and enterprise software. Open to Head of Engineering, VP Engineering and CTO opportunities in product companies, scale-ups and Global Capability Centers (GCCs).

Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

AI stack

antigravity

claude code

codex

hugging face

langchain

ollama

Work experience

Head of Engineering (SVP) at DriveX, Sep 2025 - Present · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, India's fastest-growing two-wheeler commerce platform | ₹500Cr monthly GMV | 57-member Engineering, Product , Support , Devops and Data org Responsible for technology strategy and execution across Marketplace, Financing, Auctions, Retail Operations, Refurbishment and Customer Experience. AI systems shipped to production: · Voice AI platform (multilingual: English, Kannada, Hindi & Tamil) — increased low-intent lead conversion from 2% to 30% · AI Sales Intelligence platform — Analyses customer conversations to generate CRM dispositions, coaching scores and NPS insights; doubled ATV-to-Visit conversion from ~16% to ~30% · AI Inspection Reports — converted raw vehicle observations into customer-facing reports; doubled MOM revenue in related stream · AutoQC Computer Vision platform — automated quality validation for 80% of vehicle listings, eliminating manual review at scale · Conversational Commerce Engine — processed 40,000+ bids, facilitated 2,350+ transactions, generated ₹7Cr topline revenue · Operational automations (PO, BOM, ANPR, OCR, invoice matching) — improved work-order accuracy from 19% to 82%, reduced vehicle turnaround by 4 hours per unit Platform & Data: · Established centralized data and intelligence platform enabling self-serve analytics and conversational BI across business functions - Reduced dependency on centralized analytics team by 50% · Defined long-term platform strategy for Marketplace, Auctions and Refurbishment operations Engineering Leadership & Governance: · Owned full technology AOP across talent, infrastructure, platforms and vendors · Led information security, audit and governance initiatives · Built and scaled 60-member cross-functional organization spanning Engineering, Product, Support, Devops and Data

Director of Engineering at Acko, Sep 2022 - Aug 2025 · 2 y 11 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Led Claims, Post-Purchase & Policy engineering across Auto, Health and Life insurance — including the 0→1 launch of Acko Garage from concept to EBITDA-positive in 18 months. · Managed 35+ engineers, managers, architects and technical leaders across 4 teams · Built unified claims platform consolidating fragmented systems across Auto, Health and Life into a single configurable engine · Launched Acko Garage from MVP (6 weeks) to 5 operational garages to EBITDA-positive — a full 0→1 business build · Reduced customer experience issues by 50% through operational excellence and self-serve automation · Improved engineering productivity and reduced delivery costs by 25%+ through automation and platform reuse · Led AI initiatives: ML damage detection, LLM-based OCR for invoice automation, claims automation and risk analytics

Director of Technology at Ivy Mobility, Dec 2021 - Sep 2022 · 10 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area, Owned and managed the strategic initiatives charter for Ivy Mobility’s Distributor Management System (DMS) and headed the Architecture Review Board, defining technical strategy, reducing hurdles to adoption, and simplifying the architecture. * Architectural Modernization: I successfully transitioned the platform from a legacy scheduler-based system to a high-performance, event-driven architecture. This was critical in meeting strict SLAs and directly led to the retention of four marquee enterprise clients. * Engineering Scaling & Quality: I built a diverse team of 30 engineers, including 8 architects, selecting (and moving) specific engineers from different teams into an architecture focused team. By establishing new code review processes focused on both speed and quality, we were able to reduce development rework by 30%. * Infrastructure Optimization: I led the migration from expensive enterprise databases to PostgreSQL. This move reduced our vendor dependency, allowed for much faster schema changes during product discovery, and cut our go-live costs by 10%. * Unified UI Strategy: I spearheaded the complete redesign of our native mobile apps and desktop interfaces, moving them to a unified React-based web UI. This significantly streamlined our development process and reduced long-term maintenance complexity.

Senior Engineering Manager at Khoros, Jun 2021 - Dec 2021 · 7 mos, On-site, My primary focus was to scale the "Care" engineering team across India, the US, and South America, building a high-performing global organization from the ground up while maintaining the technical discipline required for rapid, reliable delivery. * Scaling & Leadership: I grew the team from 2 to 40 members, including three managers, and established a pipeline that allowed us to maintain consistent 2-week release cycles during hyper-growth. * Tech Debt & Quality: I led a concerted effort to reduce technical debt by 40% through sustained backlog reduction and improved collaboration between engineering, product, and UX teams. * Innovation: I secured a patent for gesture-based community moderation, a technical solution that directly reduced customer experience (CX) effort by over 30%.

Engineering Manager at Khoros, Feb 2020 - Jun 2021 · 1 yr 5 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Senior Technical Architect (Tech Manager) at GXS, Jan 2019 - Feb 2020 · 1 yr 2 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I architected and led the engineering for our enterprise FMCG supply chain management and e-invoicing SaaS platforms. This was a deep technical leadership role where I managed the full product lifecycle, from initial concept to supporting multiple global enterprise tenants * High-Scale Architecture: I designed and managed multi-tenant systems capable of handling over 10M transactions daily and 500+ TPS during peak loads. These platforms were critical to the business, contributing over $15M in revenue within a two-year period. * From Concept to Scale: I worked closely with product and business teams to take the platform from its initial concept to eight enterprise tenants within two years. I established the foundational engineering standards for the team, including technical review processes and delivery frameworks that ensured system reliability across our multi-tenant products.

Architect at GXS, Jun 2016 - Jan 2019 · 2 yrs 8 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Principal Engineer at GXS, Oct 2013 - Jun 2016 · 2 yrs 9 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Education

Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Electronics and Communications Engineering, Manipal institute of technology

POST GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR LEADERS (PGP - AIFL), Artificial Intelligence, Great learning