---
title: "Karthik Murugesan - Chief Technology Officer (CTO) & Principal in Greater Bengaluru Area | Tal"
description: "Meet Karthik Murugesan, CTO at Sequoia | Leading AI-Native Product & Engineering Transformation | Compound Engineering, Product-Builder, Platform & Security at scale based in Greater Bengaluru Area."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/karthik-murugesan/share-image"
---

# Karthik Murugesan on Tal

## Headline

CTO at Sequoia \| Leading AI\-Native Product & Engineering Transformation \| Compound Engineering, Product\-Builder, Platform & Security at scale

## About

I lead technology at Sequoia with a single focus: turning it into business outcomes — faster time to value for clients, lower cost\-to\-serve, and more capacity for the teams who serve them\. For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services — and the biggest opportunity isn't selling a better platform, it's doing the work\. The distinction is copilot vs\. autopilot: a copilot makes clients and advisors faster and hands them the output to own; an autopilot delivers the outcome directly\. Every workflow we automate returns hours to clients and advisors — and every hour returned goes back into relationships, judgment, and growth, the things that genuinely need a human\. That's what we're building at Sequoia\. Sequoia OS is the AI\-native operating system for Total Compensation & Benefits\. Where traditional SaaS sells software, Sequoia OS brings clients and advisors onto one platform — improving client productivity and maximizing the value of their investment in people\. It's AI\-native by design: the intelligence doesn't sit beside the work, it does the work\. Alongside the CTO role, I head Sequoia's India Technology Center as Site Lead, where I scaled it from \~25 to 320\+ people across Technology, People, Talent, Finance, and Facilities\. How I lead: • Outcomes over output — value and impact, not tickets and features\. • Productivity as strategy — do more, for more clients, with the same team\. • Owner mindset — act at \~70%, observe, course\-correct\. • Still love to code — I stay close to the craft and keep my hands in the technology\. Earlier — 19\+ years building platforms at global scale: Big Data & AI/ML\. Built petabyte\-scale platforms for Huawei Mobile Services — an ML platform \(like Uber Michelangelo / Facebook FBLearner\), federated learning, CTR prediction, and data\-science experimentation — across 70\+ countries under GDPR\. Data applications \(45\+ countries\)\. Shipped Personalization \(recommendations, feeds\), Marketing \(persona, DMP\), Advertising \(pCTR & relevance\), and Analytics \(dashboards, BI\)\. Teams from scratch\. Stood up engineering orgs — the EMUI ROM team, a Qualcomm–Huawei joint innovation lab, the VMall e\-commerce platform, and the Mobile Services India center\. E\-commerce & innovation\. Incubated Huawei's overseas e\-commerce platform \(commercialized in 9\+ countries\) and shipped market\-first innovations — a world\-first Soft\-Wi\-Fi Datacard and India's first low\-tier Cloud Phone — lifting sales 300%\+\. Standards\. Represented Huawei and Samsung in the LIMO Foundation and OMA Device Management\.

## Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

## Work experience

Chief Technology Officer \(CTO\) & Principal at Sequoia, May 2021 \- Present · 5 yrs 6 mos, Bangalore Urban, Sequoia is the strategic partner helping investor\-backed companies of all sizes, from 20 to 20,000 employees, achieve their business goals through smarter people spend\. With our total compensation and benefits solutions, we combine advisory, outsourcing, and our integrated platform to help clients get the most from their people strategy\. Sequoia OS is our AI\-native operating system for Total Compensation and Benefits\. It unifies companies’ workforce data and brings clients and advisors together on one platform to plan, decide, and execute\. Intelligence is embedded directly into the work, helping users move from insight to action\. As Chief Technology Officer, I lead the 230\+ people technology organization building and scaling Sequoia OS, translating technology into measurable business outcomes: faster time to value, lower cost to serve, and greater capacity for advisory teams\. My scope spans technology strategy, product engineering, platform architecture, AI transformation, cybersecurity, and reliability\. Scope of leadership: • Partner with executive and business leaders to connect technology investments with product adoption, service automation, operating leverage, client outcomes, and company growth\. • Lead product engineering across Compensation, Benefits, People, PEO, Analytics, and shared platform capabilities\. • Define the architecture and technology strategy for an enterprise grade multi\-product platform\. • Evolve Sequoia OS from traditional SaaS into an AI\-native platform with embedded intelligence, natural user experiences, multi\-channel access, and agentic workflow automation\. • Establish an AI\-native engineering system built around agent\-ready codebases, AI\-assisted development, autonomous validation, automated quality gates, observability, and self\-service infrastructure\. • Embed security and reliability throughout the software delivery lifecycle through automated testing, security scanning, product\-level observability and Zero Trust principles\.

Site Lead, Sequoia India Center at Sequoia India, May 2021 \- Present · 5 yrs 6 mos, Bengaluru, I set up and manage Sequoia's India Technology Center, which scaled from \~25 people to 320\+ across Technology, Services, People, Talent, Finance, and Facilities\. Today it stands as a core hub of Sequoia's technology and innovation, transforming the way we do business\.

Chief Architect, AI/ML Engineering \| Head \- Technology at Search & Big Data Platform Group at Huawei Technologies India Pvt\. Ltd\., May 2016 \- Apr 2021 · 5 yrs, Bengaluru, Huawei's Consumer Cloud Services aim to provide users around the globe with secure, rich, and high\-quality cloud services through device\-cloud collaboration in order to enhance user loyalty and construct a sustainable cloud\-device service ecosystem for Huawei devices\. The number of Huawei Consumer Cloud Services users reached 460\+ million in 2018, spanning more than 200 countries and regions\. Seven Industry leading cloud Services currently available include the Huawei Theme Store, Magazine Unlock, HiCloud, SkyTone, Huawei Pay, HiApp, and Huawei Videos\. Heading the Architecture and Product Management Group building various Big Data platforms for Consumer Cloud Dept touching more than 460M users\. 1\. AI Platform: Building a generalized AI/ML Platform that can be easily used for multiple machine learning use\-cases across various consumer cloud services\. Includes both client\-side ML and server\-side ML\. Delivered the Industry's first configurable Federated Learning Solution\. 2\. Recommender Platform: Real\-time personalised recommender platform based on user context, characteristics and behaviour using latest technologies of Hadoop Ecosystem \(Spark, Streaming, Kafka, Druid, TensorFlow, PMML etc\.\)\. Three data pipelines \(On\-line, Near\-line and Offline\) for personalised recommendations updated in minutes\. 3\. Data Management Platform \(DMP\) : Building the DMP Product \(or Audience Management Platform\) for Huawei Advertisement Business\. Technically based out of Spark Streaming/Flink and can handle more than a billion event/day on real\-time\. 4\. Experimentation Platform: Large Scale Generic AB Test Platform that can cater to all Huawei Cloud products from Machine learning to Web applications

CTO Office Head/Lead Architect \(Ecommerce\), Consumer BG at Huawei Technologies India Pvt\. Ltd\., Apr 2014 \- Mar 2016 · 2 yrs, Bengaluru Area, India, • Incubated and Setup the Overseas E\-Commerce Platform team from the scratch for Honor Product Line that will be deployed for all overseas markets other than China \(Already live stores: shop\.huawei\.ru, honor\.co\.id, honor\.ph, vmall\.my\)\. The platform is split across three key sub\-platforms:, Core E\-Commerce Platform, Rush buy/Flash Buy Platform and Digital Marketing Platform\. • Build and commercialized the complete Core E\-commerce platform as One\-Track that supports Multi\-site \(B2C/B2B/B2xB\), Multi\-branded \(Honor/Huawei/Vmall\), Multi Lingual including RTL languages and Responsive design\. • Build and commercialized the Highly Scalable Rush Buy/Flash Buy solution \(reference: sale\.huawei\.ru\) that is used for high spike flash buy events and the platform can scale to almost linearly to cater more than 5000 Orders/Sec any instance\. • Architected the Digital Market Platform \(DMP\) based on Laravel to support easily development for all events, games etc with most common widgets/libraries/frameworks developed as components etc\. Flexible Admin framework developed to easy admin of all application and widget configuration\. • Setup the complete DevOps processes based on Jenkins and Ansible with all 4C \(Continuous Build/Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Continuous Monitoring\) capabilities\. • Strengthened the complete development process based on Integrated Lean Startup and Scrum\.

Android System Group Head/Senior System Architect, Consumer BG at Huawei Technologies India Pvt\. Ltd\., Jan 2010 \- Mar 2014 · 4 yrs 3 mos, Bengaluru Area, India, • Setup the complete Android Systems Group \(Driver/Protocol/Multimedia\) with a peak team size of around 100\+ people\. • Built a very close cooperation with Qualcomm India at the senior management level and setup a Joint cooperation lab with them to optimize the end\-to\-end delivery and to enhance the product quality\. With this cooperation, both Systems groups work together in the Pre\-CS phase for various chipsets \(7x27A/8x25\) and make sure that Huawei products based on those chipsets are commercialized first in the world\. • Responsible for Micro\-Innovations and solutions for Smartphones and Datacards targeted toward India and other south pacific countries\. Some of the key solutions for various products commercialized in India/South Pacific market were: \-\- India's first Cloudphone \(Sonic with Cloud\+\) targeted at a low\-tier/mid\-tier segment launched in H2 2011 in Indian market\. – This is the first low cost cloud phone with all Huawei Cloud\+ services\. Cloud\+ service offered were messaging with Message\+ to share texts, pictures, videos and voice notes, 16GB Cloud disk for storage, Phone Finder to locate, back\-up and lock, Cloud Gallery for viewing and sharing, Huawei Streams for integrated social phonebook experience, Huawei App Store for Indian and global apps, Sync Data and OTA Solution for OS upgrade\. \-\- World first Soft\-Wi\-Fi datacard launched in India open/operator market in H2 2012\. Huawei Soft Wi\-Fi lets you transform any laptop with a Wi\-Fi adapter into a Wi\-Fi hotspot with a simple software to share internet connection with other device\(s\) via Wi\-Fi\. \-\- World first cloud datacard solution launched in India open market & operator market in H1 2012\. • Lead the Android OS upgrade projects in Huawei India and done the OS upgrades \(ICS, JB etc\) for some of the hero products based Qualcomm 8x55, 7x27A/8x25 chipsets\. Responsible for complete Android domain capability for APAC customizations for more than 10 products\.

System Architect, Consumer BG at Huawei Technologies India Pvt\. Ltd\., Sep 2008 \- Jan 2010 · 1 yr 5 mos, Bengaluru Area, India, • Responsible for the Smartphone & datacard product delivery for India open market\. Analyzing & defining Indian Open market software requirements for smartphone and optimizing the devices for Indian networks\. • Setup the Set\-top box development team in India and delivered some of the key products to leading DTB/Cable vendors like Airtel, Tatasky, Reliance, Den etc\. • Conceptualized the world first VAS Datacard and commercialized the product with more than 15 operators across the world\. Based on this, some of the commonly used applications are made portable and can be preloaded in the datacard and carried all the applications\+data along with the datacard where you go\. • Bundling solutions of our datacard/module with some of the key tablet vendors based on Linux\.

Assistant Manager at Samsung Electronics, Aug 2007 \- Aug 2008 · 1 yr 1 mo, Suwon, Gyeonggi\-do, Korea, • Involved in most of the key Mobile Linux Standardization groups like the LiMo Foundation \(www\.limofoundation\.org\), Linux Phone Standards for Smart Phones \( www\.lipsforum\.org\) and Free Smart Phone Platform \( www\. freesmartphone\.org\) etc\. • Developed the first LGPL licensed open source Software Rasterization Engine Implementation of Khronos OpenVG 1\.0\.1 Specification • Responsible for complete design of the components and guided the team technically for XOcean Application Framework commercialization for Linux smartphones\. • Responsible for identifying the bottlenecks and tuning the XOcean application framework and was able to bring down the application startup time to less than 2 seconds from 6 seconds\. • Developed various performance/diagnostic tools for ARM target like system wide memory profiling/CPU profiling and Application level memory profiling/leak detection/CPU Profiling\. etc to support my performance tuning activity\.

## Education

Bachelor of Engineering \(B\.E\.\), Electrical and Electronics Engineering, College of Engineering, Guindy

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