Headline

Director of Product, AI & Platform | Building AI-native enterprise products 0→1 | Agents, RAG, evals, platform & API strategy | Ex-Amazon, Microsoft, Plivo (YC S12) | IIT Delhi CS · ISB

About

I build at the intersection of B2B SaaS and hard technology, and I stay hands-on with the stack while leading the teams that ship it. Over 15 years I've gone from engineering at Amazon and Microsoft, to founding two startups (one acquired by Snapdeal), to leading product for AI-native enterprise platforms. Today I'm a Director of Product leading the AI and platform org at one of India's largest HRMS platforms, owning strategy and roadmap across five areas, core platform, AI, analytics, mobile, and connectors/marketplace, plus the build-vs-buy framework for AI capabilities. What makes my work a little unusual: I'm a product leader who's still genuinely hands-on with the AI builder stack. I define agent architecture and eval frameworks, reason about RAG, retrieval, and RBAC-enforced data access, and work directly with engineering on architecture and tradeoffs, not just the roadmap. I've shipped RAG and text-to-SQL agents, hardened access-control foundations for safe multi-tenant AI, and I'm building an MCP server so external agents can interface with our platform. Before this I spent 4 years at Plivo (YC S12, ~$50M ARR) as founding PM of a new 0→1 B2B sales-engagement product line, from whiteboard to production, discovery and hiring through GTM. Earlier I led an e-commerce search & recommendations API platform (Unbxd, acquired by Netcore ~$100M) and spent a deliberate stretch as a hands-on GenAI builder with OpenAI, Anthropic, and LangChain. Engineer by training (IIT Delhi CS). I care about platform thinking, developer experience, and what it actually takes to ship GenAI in production. Always happy to connect with builders and product leaders working at the AI/enterprise edge.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

aistudio

claude code

claude

cursor

gemini

grok

Work experience

Director of Product, AI & Platform at Keka HR, 2025 - Present · 1 yr 8 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Keka HR is one of India's largest B2B HRMS platforms: 8,000+ customers, ~$25M ARR, across India, US, and GCC markets. I lead the AI & platform product org (7 PMs) across five areas: core domain platform, AI platform, analytics, mobile, and connectors/marketplace, owning product strategy, roadmap, and the build-vs-buy framework, and partnering with engineering squads across the org. ◉ Drove the hardening and scoping of the platform's role-based access control (v1 live): removed hardcoded permissions and closed multi-tenant access gaps customers were hitting, the access-control foundation for safe AI and multi-tenant data use. ◉ Defined and architected the company's first AI agents, two RAG agents (policy, helpdesk) and a text-to-SQL analytics agent, including the eval framework (golden datasets; accuracy / cost / latency gates) and RBAC-enforced, human-in-the-loop guardrails; currently in internal pilot. ◉ Own the build-vs-buy evaluation for AI orchestration and integration: ran the POC of an external AI/iPaaS platform and lead the analysis informing the in-house-vs-vendor path, with a connector strategy built on an iPaaS layer rather than point-to-point integrations. ◉ Made the call to pause the legacy report builder and pivot reporting toward the text-to-SQL agent; prototyping an MCP server to let external agents (e.g. Claude) interface with the platform.

Generative AI Builder & Fractional CPO at Independent / Advisory, 2024 - 2025 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, A deliberate, hands-on deep-dive into generative AI alongside fractional product leadership. ◉ Built AI prototypes end-to-end, RAG and agent workflows, and a hypothesis-to-backtest-to-execution quant pipeline, with OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, LangChain, and vector databases. ◉ Fractional CPO for a longevity-tech startup: led product strategy, user flows, feature prioritisation, and the GenAI integration roadmap for personalisation and reporting.

Product Head, B2B Sales Engagement Platform at Plivo, 2020 - 2024 · 4 yrs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Plivo (YC S12), developer-first cloud communications, ~$50M ARR, a competitor to Twilio. ◉ Built a new B2B sales-engagement product line (Sellular) 0→1 as founding and lead PM, owned discovery, scoping, roadmap, hiring, and go-to-market. ◉ Ran customer discovery across 100+ stakeholder interviews; drove the product from a single-channel dialer to multi-channel sequencing with email and Salesforce sync, and dogfooded with Plivo's internal SDR team. ◉ Hired and led a small cross-functional team (an SPM plus specialist and analyst roles) within a ~20-member squad across engineering, design, marketing, and sales; set OKRs and success metrics.

Head of Product, Employee Volunteering Platform at Goodera, 2019 - 2020 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Goodera, enterprise employee-volunteering platform used by 400+ enterprises (incl. Amazon, IBM, Nike, Oracle) reaching 10M+ employees. ◉ Owned the product end-to-end from ideation to release; ran user research and usability testing to direct the roadmap. ◉ Defined and tracked the core KPI set with regular executive reporting.

Senior Product Manager, E-commerce Search & Recommendations (API Platform) at Unbxd Inc, 2016 - 2019 · 3 yrs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Unbxd, AI-powered e-commerce search & recommendations SaaS (acquired by Netcore ~$100M). ◉ Owned the Catalog & Merchandising API suite and a personalised recommendations engine serving major e-commerce clients, defined API specifications and drove the full product lifecycle from conception to deprecation. ◉ Partnered across engineering, marketing, and sales on API launches and complex client integrations.

Education

Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Master of Business Administration - MBA, Finance, General, Indian School of Business

Public links

github: https://github.com/prateekagarwal60