Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Patents
Timeline
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Akshay Vaidya

Akshay Vaidya

Engineering and Product Leader | Proven Leadership in Site Operations
Pune

Summary

Engineering and Product Leader with a proven track record of success in site operations. Experienced in hiring, retaining, and developing high-performing teams. Adept at fostering a positive culture and promoting collaboration across multiple offices for efficient and adaptable solutions to changing needs. Skilled in architecture, strategic planning, and problem-solving, consistently achieving goals. Recognized for strong communication, organizational abilities, and dedication to creating a productive work environment.

Overview

18
18
years of professional experience
7
7
years of post-secondary education

Work History

Head Of Engineering and India Site Lead

Helpshift
Pune
01.2021 - 05.2023
  • Led the engineering, data platform and machine learning verticals
  • Led the India site for the company and helped define site policies and engagement programs to improve retention and engagement
  • Built a culture of trust and mutual support which led to attrition rate of less than 13% (industry standard 30%)
  • Drove an overhaul in the recruitment processes around the company which resulted in quicker turnaround times, better candidate experience and faster hiring for key positions.
  • Built a culture of excellence and growth which enabled team size from 70 to 90 while reducing the budget by 25%
  • Drove initiatives to improve resilience, security, quality, stability and scale which led to zero security incidents, system availability improvement from less than 97% to more than 99.9%, release failures drop from more than 10% to less than 1%, automation coverage improvement from less than 10% to more than 80%
  • Drove initiatives to improve the hardware efficiency by more than 64%
  • Introduced and improved operational processes around product prioritization, SDLC, operational review, architectural review, peer mentoring, career progression, incident management, root cause addressing, D&I
  • Improved customer focus around projects and operations which helped improve NPS scores from -35 to 70
  • Provided mentoring across the organization to help improve culture, retention and career growth
  • Provided guidance in architectural decisions across major company initiatives
  • Drove infrastructure modernization initiatives across the data and core infra organization which led to lower costs, improved stability and better data democratization
  • Acted as dedicated product manager for the machine learning team and delivered multiple projects which led to more than 10% improvement in workflow automation
  • Led the team through the Keywords acquisition of Helpshift

Head Of Engineering

PayU
Bangalore
05.2019 - 12.2020
  • Led the engineering team in PayU finance (Formerly Paysense)
  • Led a team of over 90 engineers
  • Led the team through the PayU acquisition of Paysense
  • Led the team through the successful integration of Paysense->PayU systems
  • Scaled up the organization from 40 to 90 engineers in a year
  • Drove major architectural improvements to improve the core lending platform
  • Drove initiatives to help scale up the platform by 10x

VP of Engineering

Paycraft Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Bangalore
01.2018 - 04.2019
  • Founded and led the automated fare computation business unit in the company
  • Built an open loop based PCI DSS compliant automated fare computation (AFC) system
  • Rolled out the AFC solution for Kochi buses
  • Rolled out the AFC solution for Raipur buses
  • Supported rollout of AFC solution for Indore buses
  • Developing AFC solution for Mumbai metro line 3

Director Of Software Development

Hike Messenger
New Delhi
06.2016 - 07.2017
  • Led the stickers and messaging infra teams at Hike
  • Architected the engineering recruiting pipeline at Hike which improved hiring from not being able to hire in 3 months to meeting hiring SLAs for over 80% of positions
  • Retained and mentored key talent and developed a culture of impact focus at Hike
  • Streamlined ownership areas of team to improve cohesion and reduce overall team entropy
  • Improved the overall remote office dynamics between the Bangalore and Delhi offices in engineering team
  • Helped create tribes for iOS, Android and backend team to maintain focus around code quality,
  • Drove hackathons focused around tech debt, code maintainability, testability, architecture and code quality to reduce time to support key product releases.
  • Built an automated sticker delivery infrastructure which led to improvements in both precision and recall
  • Built generic content ingestion and content delivery framework for all content types at Hike
  • Built infrastructure for instrumentation, alerting and troubleshooting for client side issues
  • Built infrastructure for managing assets for client to help optimize user experience.

Software Engineering Manager

Facebook
Seattle
08.2014 - 05.2016
  • Managed the media infra team within messenger
  • Built E2E media upload stack and improved the media upload reliability on Messenger and Facebook this led to Messenger video upload reliability bump from 64% to 96%
  • Built rich media download library to help improve the overall data efficiency for Messenger this led to more than 50% reduction in the overall data usage for Messenger
  • Built built infrastructure to de-dup media entries in the FB media cache which resulted in more than 15 million dollars of annual savings in hardware cost
  • Briefly managed the real time engine team within Messenger
  • Team owned the engine component that powers all voice and video calls on Messenger

Software Engineer

Facebook
Seattle
01.2013 - 09.2014
  • Led the team that built quasar service for display time spam filtering infrastructure for all of FB for filtering each and every user generated content
  • Service operates at incredibly high scale of > 300 billion requests per day (2014) with latencies ranging between 7us to 100ms
  • Built out the core logic for URL matcher, substring matcher and regex matcher
  • Built out the operational pieces which included caching, architecture, metrics, alerting and automated kill switches
  • Service helped reduce the annual hardware cost by more than 17 million dollars
  • Service was launched without any high impact incidents

Senior Software Development Engineer

Amazon.com
Seattle
07.2005 - 12.2012
  • AWS S3 : Dec, 2011 to Dec, 2012
  • Participate in design, review and development of infrastructure components for a distributed networking device (Java, C, Intel DPDK, Linux)
  • Supply Chain Optimization : Feb, 2010 to Dec, 2011
  • Designed and developed a partitioned data warehouse solution for simplifying business data analysis for simulations
  • (Java, MySql)
  • Designed and developed dashboards for analyzing and comparing business metrics for simulations
  • (Java, Javascript, JQuery, MySql)
  • Designed and developed dashboards for identifying root cause run time increase for a massively parallel and pipelined supply chain simulator
  • Simulator infrastructure was distributed on hundreds of machines and it simulated several millions of orders per day
  • Developed multiple business features and operational (performance + stability) enhancements for the simulator
  • Merchant Technologies : July, 2005 to Jan, 2010
  • Team lead for the POC project
  • Owned team task backlog and process for prioritizing and scheduling tasks
  • Analyzed operation metrics to recommend and prioritize tasks to improve site availability and reduced high severity operations from > 40 per week to less than 4 per week
  • Analyzed performance metrics to recommend, prioritize and lead projects to reduce the client side browser latency for the merchant order processing pipeline (99.97% availability, >1K requests per sec peak), reducing the client side latency by 50%
  • (Java, Oracle, Perl Mason)
  • Worked on the project to migrate several billion dollars worth of third party transaction data from a loosely consistent legacy payment system to a highly consistent data store for the new payment UI
  • (Java)
  • Separated the monolithic legacy third party listing/auctions/p2p payments/Preorder website into its vertical functional websites/services to allow independent scaling/deprecation
  • (C++)
  • Developed multiple business features and operational (performance + stability) enhancements

Education

Masters - Computer Science

The University of Texas At Arlington
Arlington, TX, USA
01.2002 - 01.2005

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) - Computer Engineering

University of Mumbai
Mumbai, India
01.1998 - 01.2002

Patents

Connection publishing in a distributed load balancer, https://www.google.com/patents/CA2909686A1

Timeline

Head Of Engineering and India Site Lead

Helpshift
01.2021 - 05.2023

Head Of Engineering

PayU
05.2019 - 12.2020

VP of Engineering

Paycraft Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
01.2018 - 04.2019

Director Of Software Development

Hike Messenger
06.2016 - 07.2017

Software Engineering Manager

Facebook
08.2014 - 05.2016

Software Engineer

Facebook
01.2013 - 09.2014

Senior Software Development Engineer

Amazon.com
07.2005 - 12.2012

Masters - Computer Science

The University of Texas At Arlington
01.2002 - 01.2005

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) - Computer Engineering

University of Mumbai
01.1998 - 01.2002
Akshay VaidyaEngineering and Product Leader | Proven Leadership in Site Operations