--- title: "Lakshmi Karthikesan - Engineering Manager in Bangalore Urban | Tal" description: "Meet Lakshmi Karthikesan, Engineering Leader ex-Microsoft India Development Center | Driving AI-First Contact Center Solutions based in Bangalore Urban. AI stack includes claude code, claude, and github copilot." image: "https://tal.club/meet/lakshmi-karthikesan/share-image" --- # Lakshmi Karthikesan on Tal ## Headline Engineering Leader ex\-Microsoft India Development Center \| Driving AI\-First Contact Center Solutions ## About I am a senior engineering leader with 21\+ years of experience building and operating mission\-critical platforms, modernizing large\-scale data systems, and leading global engineering organizations\. My work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud and data modernization, AI\-enabled workflow automation, platform reliability, observability, security, and organizational transformation\. I have led engineers, managers, architects, and data\-science teams to deliver dependable systems that turn data and intelligence into measurable operational outcomes\. At PayPal, I led global engineering for a Merchant Reporting Platform processing more than 2 million scheduled reports daily across four geographies and supporting more than 1,000 API requests per second\. I led modernization from Oracle to GCP BigQuery, strengthened data fidelity and reconciliation for compliance\- and dispute\-critical workflows, and improved operational effectiveness through observability and telemetry practices\. At Microsoft, I lead product engineering for Unified Routing within Dynamics 365 Automated Conversation Distribution\. I have led delivery of AI\-powered contact\-center capabilities, using Azure OpenAI and workflow automation to support AI\-assisted routing, knowledge\-driven customer resolution, and more efficient operations\. I also led the transition from dedicated self\-hosted environments to a shared infrastructure model, reducing infrastructure\-management overhead by more than 60%, and built a 10\-person data\-science team to advance AI product and model investments\. My technical foundation includes an M\.S\. in Embedded Systems and Robotics, together with experience across automotive, locomotive and critical infrastructure, consumer security, digital TV, cloud platforms, financial technology, and contact\-center systems\. This breadth shapes my approach to AI and automation: the most valuable systems are not only intelligent, but also reliable, observable, secure, governed, and safe under real\-world operating constraints\. I am particularly interested in agentic systems, reliable infrastructure and data platforms, and applying AI to improve complex, real\-world operations\. I enjoy building high\-performing engineering organizations, developing technical leaders, simplifying platforms, and translating ambitious technology strategy into measurable customer and business outcomes\. ## Location Bangalore Urban ## AI stack claude code claude github copilot perplexity ChatGPT Microsoft Copilot ## Work experience Engineering Manager at Microsoft India Development Center, Aug 2024 \- Aug 2026 · 2 yrs 1 mo, Bengaluru, Led product engineering strategy for Unified Routing within Dynamics 365 Automated Conversation Distribution, supporting an AI\-first enterprise contact\-center vision\. Led engineering strategy and execution for AI\-powered Unified Routing, aligning product, engineering, customer, and global stakeholder priorities for a high\-availability enterprise platform\. Led delivery of a new AI\-powered contact\-center capability from inception to production within one quarter, enabling customers on contemporary platforms to migrate to Dynamics 365 using their legacy conversation transcripts\. Established a transcript\-driven knowledge pipeline that mined legacy conversation data for knowledge articles and business\-policy context, enabling production\-quality AI\-assisted resolution of customer queries\. Re\-architected legacy contact\-center workflows into natural\-language text and real\-time voice experiences, using small and large language models to augment traditional routing and agent workflows, reduce manual intervention, and improve resolution responsiveness\. Defined safer rollout, automation, and operational\-excellence practices across core platform capabilities, improving delivery reliability and reducing operational risk\. Led the transition from dedicated self\-hosted environments to a shared infrastructure model, reducing management overhead by 60%\+ and centralizing infrastructure ownership\. Built and led a 10\-person data\-science team to strengthen AI product and model\-investment capability; established structured hiring practices to attract and assess specialized talent\. Led adoption of Copilot and Claude across selected design, development, and automation workflows; established use cases, enablement, and outcome tracking to improve engineering throughput and reduce manual effort\. Health and well\-being at Career Break, Jan 2024 \- Aug 2024 · 8 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area Software Engineering Manager at Paypal india private limited, Dec 2021 \- Jan 2024 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India, Directed global engineering for Merchant Reporting Platform, processing 2M\+ scheduled reports daily across 4 geographies with 1000\+ API RPS\. Led modernization of monolithic Oracle data stores to GCP BigQuery, improving performance, reliability, and platform scalability\. Established observability and telemetry practices that improved decision\-making, incident response, and engineering productivity\. Drove data fidelity and reconciliation improvements for compliance\- and dispute\-critical reporting workflows\. Drove a leaner, higher\-leverage operating model, reducing headcount by 50% through vendor support rationalization, skill consolidation, and removal of redundant coverage\. Led a distributed engineering organization of 30\+ engineers across Bengaluru and Chennai, with 2 senior managers, 2–3 principal architects, and a strong individual contributor base\. Senior Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft, May 2020 \- Dec 2021 · 1 yr 8 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, Leading a team of 9 full time employees and 5 vendors and responsible for people management and technical deliverables of the team\. Currently working with the team on re\-architecting the Infrastructure of a legacy product called Resource Scheduling Optimization \(RSO\) in Field Service Application of D365 CRM product to move it from a Single tenant Infrastructure to Multi\-tenant architecture primarily for increasing user adoption and scalability, availability, reliability, performance requirements thereof\. Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft, Sep 2019 \- May 2020 · 9 mos, Bangalore Senior Engineering Manager at Microsoft India Development Center, May 2017 \- Dec 2021 · 4 yrs 8 mos, Led engineering for the Microsoft Groups platform, supporting 20\+ high\-traffic applications including Teams, Outlook, Yammer, and SharePoint\. Owned core platform capabilities across authentication, authorization, and group lifecycle services\. Led re\-architecture efforts across Dynamics 365 CRM to improve reliability, lower cost of ownership, and accelerate release cadence\. Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, May 2017 \- May 2020 · 3 yrs 1 mo, Hyderabad, Telangana, India Senior Technical Lead at McAfee India, Sep 2016 \- May 2017 · 8 mo, Bengaluru Team Lead at Lore Software Solutions, Oct 2013 \- Sep 2016 · 2 y 11 mo, Bengaluru Technical Lead at HCL Technology, Sep 2010 \- Sep 2013 · 3 y, Bengaluru Lead Engineer at GE Transportation, Dec 2007 \- Aug 2010 · 2 y 8 mo, Bengaluru Project Engineer at Wipro Technology, Mar 2004 \- Dec 2007 · 3 y 9 mo, Bengaluru ## Education Master of Science \(MSc\), Embedded Systems and Robotics, University of Essex Bachelor of Engineering \(BE\), Electrical and Electronics Engineering, University of Madras [View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/lakshmi-karthikesan) ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Person", "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/lakshmi-karthikesan#person", "name": "Lakshmi Karthikesan", "url": "https://tal.club/meet/lakshmi-karthikesan", "image": "https://tal.club/meet/lakshmi-karthikesan/profile-photo.jpg", "description": "Meet Lakshmi Karthikesan, Engineering Leader ex-Microsoft India Development Center | Driving AI-First Contact Center Solutions based in Bangalore Urban. 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