About

I started writing code professionally in 2007 at Microsoft India, mostly in C#, mostly in Visual Studio, and mostly wondering what I’d got myself into. Two years in, I left for Edinburgh to do an MSc in Computer Science, where I wrote a dissertation on join algorithms using Hadoop and somehow came out with a Distinction. That was the point where distributed systems stopped being a module on a timetable and became the thing I actually wanted to do.

After Edinburgh, I landed at VisualDNA in London, doing the kind of work that sounds impressive in retrospect but mostly involved staring at Cassandra logs at odd hours. We were running 4TB of data through a cluster held together by optimism and a few well-placed MapReduce jobs. I gave a talk about it once, which probably makes it my peak extrovert moment.

From there I moved to DataSift, where I spent five years building systems that archived and queried massive volumes of social data. About 2TB a day, which in 2012 felt like an absurd amount and now sounds like a quiet Tuesday. I started as a Big Data Engineer, got promoted to Engineering Team Lead, and helped build the PYLON for Facebook Topic Data product. The stack was Hadoop, HBase, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Scala. I learned two things during this period: how to build systems that work at scale, and how to lead a team without pretending you have all the answers.

After DataSift, I spent a couple of years at QuantumBlack (now part of McKinsey) as a Platform Engineer and occasional Solutions Architect. Scala, Spark, Mesos, and a lot of conversations with data scientists about what “production-ready” actually means. It was good work, but I missed being closer to the product.

In 2018 I joined Meltwater, where I’ve been ever since. I started as a Senior Software Engineer, got promoted to Principal Engineer, then Team Lead, and now Engineering Manager. The stack these days is Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Terraform, and a healthy amount of AWS and Azure. Somewhere along the way the role shifted from “person who writes code and also leads a team” to “person who leads multiple teams and occasionally misses writing code.” I’m now responsible for the Content Crawlers initiative, leading multiple teams working on AI-powered crawling infrastructure.

The transition from engineer to manager has been the most interesting part of my career so far. Not because it’s glamorous, but because it’s hard in ways that nobody warns you about. I write about it on this blog, slowly but honestly.

I live in the UK. I have an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and a B.Tech from Amrita in India. When I’m not working, I’m probably reading, running, or checking a monitoring dashboard out of habit.

Looking for the formal version? Download my CV (PDF).