Building a world class engineering team to help drive positive change and deliver on Go’s core belief that most accidents don’t need to happen.

Joined as the head of engineering at the seed stage of funding in 2017 when the team had only 2 full time junior engineers and 3 AI/computer vision scientists. Over the next five and a half years hired engineering leaders and senior engineers, grew the engineering team to 35 and led every aspect of the engineering team including frontend, backend, devops and QA. The company raised Series A, B and C rounds during this time period. Grew engineering leaders within the team with several engineers growing into Principal Engineers and Director level roles. Partnered with the AI science team to take their prototypes to build highly scalable and secure advanced analytics products utilizing state of the art research in Computer Vision, AI and Deep Learning. Customers included three letter intelligence agencies with a very high bar for quality and security. Delivered on very challenging projects including scaling the software in the AWS top secret cloud and shipping air gapped appliances around the world. Scaled the product on multiple dimensions - users, data and number of live video streams being processed simultaneously. As a result, the product was run on an auto-scaled cluster that was able to rapidly process and analyze large quantities of data.Technologies used: Python/Django, Scala/Spark, C++, Postgres. Deployed on AWS and Azure. Led the Security team for a period of 8 months focusing on additional security scanning of the product and handling ransomware attacks by conducting tabletop exercises for business continuity.

Led the CRM engineering team. Took over a team from an acquisition by Ellie Mae and built a high performing team. Led the re-architecture efforts of the product to a scalable AWS cloud based platform. Delivered high product quality, faster performance and building of key new features. Doubled the team size from 12 to 25.

As the first employee and technical leader of the startup, quickly built a small, agile team of software engineers to launch the Beta version of the product in 1 month. Got positive responses from customers and resulted in a paid pilot customer. Iterated on the product and used advanced technologies including natural language processing and patent-pending algorithms resulting in increased customer demand. Technologies used to develop this product included Python, Django, AngularJS and MySQL.

Managed multiple teams up to 55 including three managers and two architects. Big Data Strategy and Execution:Led a team to set up a Hadoop Infrastructure including HDFS and Hive for a significant increase in data storage and processing capability and for assured future scalability. Enabled team to learn this new technology by setting up training sessions and partnering closely with Cloudera.Assured Hadoop cluster’s HA/DR by implementing two redundant clusters in multiple data centers and setting up active-active data replication using Flume technology. This ensured no loss of data and guaranteed customer SLAs were met. Hired and teamed-up with a Big Data Architect to develop a Data Lake architecture for future data ingestion and analytics needs. Formed “Customer Retention Predictive Analytics” team of big data engineers and data scientists to create a customer engagement score and display customer dashboards in Tableau. This project won a company-wide Innovation Jam award, judged by senior leaders from DI and Credit Unions. New Markets: To build a new Business Banking product to serve new markets organized an engineering team of 25 and delivered the Business Banking pilot version in a record seven months. This included hiring and ramping up new talent quickly, developing an SoA-technology stack, including micro-services, Java, Spring Boot, AngularJS and Bootstrap. The revenue from this product is expected to grow in double digits starting in CY 2016

Leading the Big Data Hadoop Infrastructure and Platform Services engineering teams at Digital Insight. Continued to lead the setup and utilization of Hadoop for Big Data Analytics at Digital Insight. Led initiative to replace Cassandra based Global Logging system with Hadoop/Hbase based system to improve scalability and efficiency. Managed the Promotion Suite engineering team that aimed to upsell / cross-sell products to customers of financial institutions. This was a Hadoop based system that generated recommendations used to display ads to customers. Also led several Platform Services engineering teams.

Led the Data for Delight team within Intuit Financial Services. This involved leading the team to build the next generation Data Platform using Hadoop. Developed and executed on the Big Data plan for the division including setting up Hadoop and integrating with a variety of data sources using Flume technology. Also led the Cross-Sell team that was responsible for implementing a product that enabled cross-sell of products and services by Intuit and financial institutions.

Led the Mint Web and Mobile engineering teams of about 30 engineers and managers. Built a high performing engineering team which launched many Web, iOS and Android updates during this period. Helped create the future vision and set priorities for the Mint product. Led an effort the realign the Agile teams to focus on the updated priorities.

Led the Small Business engineering team in IFS. Created an exceptional team of engineers who were very talented and highly engaged. This team was run like a Lean Startup (http://theleanstartup.com/). Using Lean Startup approach launched a Mobile App called Intuit Paper Trail in the Apple App Store. This app got a 4+ star rating on initial launch. Also worked collaboratively with other Intuit divisions to develop a new Web app targeting Financial Management for Small Businesses.Demonstrated my passion for innovation by launching the Innovation Program at IFS. This program resulted in many new innovations being developed.

As Group Engineering Manager of Grow Your Business Division at Intuit I was responsible for the Acquisition Channel and Websites product development initiatives. These included projects that acquired new customers for the division's products as well as building the Websites products.Previously in Grow Your Business Division developed the Email Marketing product that was integrated with QuickBooks and the Intuit Websites. This was a complex product that was developed in a very challenging timeframe. This product allowed QuickBooks users to send out email campaigns to the contacts stored in QuickBooks and then calculate the income generated from those campaigns.

Co-founded and was Engineering leader on the Intuit Small Business Community (then called JumpUp) for three years managing Engineering and QA. This started as a small team of two and grew to a peak of 25 over a course of 3 years. Integrated the Community functionality in various Intuit products including QuickBooks, Lacerte, ProSeries, etc. This product had to scale from 0 to 40 million hits to servers in 6 months and had to serve some of the most critical products at Intuit. Besides leading product development teams have also played the role of Product Manager for several teams including Project Superpowers (which aimed at improving the efficiency of the Sales and Support team). Helped define the vision for these projects, developed requirements, and then led the execution of their implementation.

Played the role of a senior technical member of a new team incharge of building new products at Intuit.

Worked as a hands-on Development Manager and Architect at Ketera which was a SAAS company in the Spend Management business. Recruited and built up the development team in India. Managed the design and development of multiple projects for web based software.Set up the new Architecture for Ketera based on the J2EE platform. Researched and utilized many Open Source technologies including an MDA tool called AndroMDA. This architecture was used by all new products at Ketera.

Was a Development Manager and Architect for the Contract Management application at Covigna. Developed the Contract Management modules using J2EE technologies on the Weblogic Application Server and multiple database platforms (Oracle and SQL Server). Led the effort to improve performance and scalability of the product.

Was the technical lead and architect of a new product called Negotiate in the Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) division of i2 Technologies for two years over multiple releases of the product. Gave technical direction to a development team spread across three different countries (California, Canada and India). The product was deployed at major customer locations with large scalability and performance requirements.

Was a key member of the core engineering team at Rightworks that architected, designed and implemented two major releases of the eProcurement application in Rightworks using JSPs, Servlets, EJBs, JDBC, and SQL on the PowerTier application server and Oracle database.

Was the Program Manager and Primary Investigator at Honeywell International of a three year project worth 0.7 million dollars to develop ARMADA, a parallel application used to demonstrate real-time fault tolerant group communication. This included program management (tracking schedule and funds), overseeing and participating in the software development, dealing with a changing team of developers, and interactions with the University of Michigan team. Published research papers on this effort (http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~farnam/pubs/2000-jjg-dsn.pdf)Was founder and leader FORTS – a three year program aimed at applying real-time fault tolerance research to an industrial system. This was a joint project with University of Pittsburgh. Led RT-MLab which was a project for development of real-time robotics system. This was a joint effort with Georgia Tech University.