Ashish Kumar Bajpai

A Software Development leader with a drive and attitude towards getting high quality products delivered “In-Time-Everytime”. Seasoned Manager with 20 years of experience in software engineering and product building with focus on defining and accomplishing organizational goals and objectives.

Offering nearly 12+ years of leadership experience in Product & Engineering with expertise on product design, AI/ML, Large scale platforms, 3P Integrations, complex applications, data analytics, scalability, system architecture and organization management

Ashish Kumar Bajpai

People:

As SVP/Head of engineering and product, Ashish has built and managed product tech organizations of up to 350 people cutting across engineering and product functions, He has led engineering organizations with Product Management, Program Management, Development, QA, Tech support, Devops, Data Sciences and Analytics. Ashish has experience of working with large generic product based organizations and Startups both. He holds expertise in establishing scalable systems and processes for engineering organizations. His approach for production rollouts has been MVP based iterative incremental development using controlled GTM rollouts.

Product:
Ashish has a 21 years of experience in technology with a twelve year in leadership roles for multiple domains across large MNCs and Startups, He has a proven track record for building high visibility high impact products in B2C/B2B space spanning across E-commerce, Hyperlocal, Pure Tech and Logistics verticals from Indian startup ecosystem (Myntra, Swiggy, Grab.in, Ola Electric) while he also has experience of delivering End to end development for multiple new products with very large scale systems like Yahoo Search, Bing Adcenter, Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Scale:

The Ecommerce platform at myntra is build to scale to order taking capability of upto 5L OPM during Myntra’s flagship EORS sale events, Migrated the order delivery capability of Grab.in (Last mile delivery arm for Reliance India) from 30k orders per day to 1 million OPD for. Swiggy instamart in 2020 was built under Ashish’s leadership to scale to 1 million OPD scale. The availability goals which Ashish has operated with for all the mentioned project has been across five 9’s i.e. 99.999% and 99.99% along with SLO/SLIs improvements from 90% to 99.9%. He also delivered the industry first chaos engineering system in house for myntra to help the organization scale to 2 million orders per minute without having any downtime in order taking flows.

Technology:

Ashish has extensive hands-on expertise in building scalable distributed applications with on-prem and cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, He holds expertise in managing and redesigning monolith/legacy systems with micro-service based scalable, distributed, high-performance, resilient, fault tolerant systems with auto scaling constructs. He has

expertise in building end to end solutions for in house analytics platforms (5TB and 5 billion events ingestion and processing) for both ecommerce and iOT based systems. He has experience of developing India's first feature gating in A/B testing platform (Developed in 2014) for myntra which is the backbone of any scalable system.

Motivation:

Some of the core values that Ashish believes in are - Innovation, hard work, a structured and methodical problem-solving approach, integrity, learning, unlearning, teamwork, collaboration and building trust with the people he works with, driven by an open and transparent communication culture. He is keen to learn new technology trends and success stories of system design across the entire IT industry, he wants to apply technology to build products/solutions to solve complex customer problems in a very simple way/non confusing customer flows.

More details:

People

Ashish’s current span of control is of 375 members with 14 direct reports. He has organized the team in a structure with heads of verticals reporting into him. He also directly manages and run a horizontal Architect forum (team of Principal Architects, with 4 architects).

Ashish is reporting to CTPO with dotted line reporting to Co-founder Bhavish Agarwal.
Direct Reports included - Head of Telematics (Senior Director), Head of Backend Engineering (Director), Head of Infosec (Senior Director), Head of Devops (Director), Head of Mobile Application development (Senior Manager), Head of Analytics (Director), Head of Frontend (Senior Manager), Head of Mobile application development( (Senior Manager)

Largest team structure - Ola Electric - Electric Vehicle

350+ product engineers split across PMO, Front End (Web and Mobile), Backend, DevOps/SRE, CX Dev, IT Systems, QE, Automation/Performance Testing and Tech Writer

Direct Reports included - Head of PMO, Head of Software Engineering (AVP), Head of Platform Engineering (GM), Head of Data (DGM), DGM Head of IT and DevOps/SRE and Sr Manager – Tech Writer
Reporting to the CTPO as Head of Engineering

His experience with hiring:

He has experience of interviewing for various startups and Product companies (In the Indian market) - team strength varying from 10 to 350+ across Product and Engineering space.

Directly managed technology team for various organizations with responsibility as an Engineering Manager to VP of Engg, SVP of Engg, CTO and CPTO (Last 5 Organisations):

- Ola Electric - 350+ Developers, QA, Support, Product Engineering & PMO
- Grab.in - Build the team from 30 members to 350 Engineers in a span of 1 year. - Behtar.com - 45 Engineers and 3 Product Managers
- Swiggy - 230 Engineering org
- Myntra – Managed a team of 70 engineers.

Hiring strategy:

Hire for the right attitude and train for technical skills so that the incumbent can be aligned with core cultural organization-level values as part of the team. Ashish highly believes that the leaders should be empathetic and technically strong so that optimal directions to engineers can be made available right from inception of a product development.

Few (out of many) Sr leaders hired / led in the past :

- Head of Backend Engineering, [Ola ELectric, Grab.in, Swiggy, Myntra] - Head of Frontend Engineering, [Grab.in, Ola Electric]
- Head of Mobile Engineering (Director) - [Ola ELectric, Grab.in, Swiggy] - Head of Infosec (GM) - [Grab.in]

- Head of Product (DIrector) - [Grab.in, Behtar, Ola Electric] - Head of Engineering (AGM) - [Grab.in, Behtar, Ola Electric] - Head of DevOps (GM), [Grab.in, Ola Electric, Swiggy]

Ashish was responsible for hiring Senior Managers or above leaders for Engineering and Product organizations in Grab.in, Ola Electric, Behtar, Swiggy and Myntra (Head of Data Science), (Head of Data Analytics), Head of Product , Head of UX , Head of Partner Services , Head of Design and more.

Products:
Products built from scratch:

1. Real Time Tracking System (0-100 Scale) -> The system allows Grab and Reliance B2C Customers to track a parcel/Item during the various stages of package delivery. This system works as a replacement for real time monitoring solutions from google maps and does a saving of multi million dollars for a fleet of up to 5L driver fleet on ground. This is used to monitor all drivers across reliance last mile logistics packages shipped via Grab. 1L RPM, 4000 Concurrent Users.

2. Hypercharger Network (Pan india Rollout 0 - 100) : Automated platform to enable auto redirection of ola electric scooter to nearby Hypercharger or non ola charger in case of lower state of charge. Exhaustive platform to control the B2B aspect of hypercharger based on location, Franchise, and Mobile app integration. Scale: Used by

4L Ola EV scooter owners with RPS of 5k

3. Myntra Marketplace (10-100) -> Complete System rewrite of Myntra platform (50+ services) to support Marketplace architecture instead of remaining a single online retailer. This was supposed to grow at Myntra online sale’s scale hence 10k RPS was system scale which was looked at.
4. Real Time Analytics Platform -> Build a real time analytics platform from scratch for swiggy instamart as a

plug and play platform common for all business and systems for swiggy.
5. Telematics Platform for EVs -> This platform is the backbone of electric vehicle OEMs in EV manufacturing

verticals,
6. Dynamic Pricing, Discounting and Offer Platform (Behtar) -> This automated platform was developed to

work as a dynamic pricing module which created campaigns across selected stores, to clear the non moving inventory and also controlled the campaigns, with minimal or no intervention from manual operations team. Scale: 800 Stores, 3L Customers, 4000 skus, 100000 Orders, 1000 OPM.

7. Real Time Onboarding of Drivers -> He managed the development and product management teams for this project which enabled a 5 minutes onboarding of a new bike rider in the Grab.in on ground driver fleet. This platform automated the entire process of manual intervention which took up to 3 weeks for finishing the onboarding of a new driver in 5 mins. Scale : 2L Existing Riders, 100 RPS, with 15 third party APIs integration for verification of all documents, KYC, Approval etc.

Did he lead product teams?
- Yes in Swiggy, He was responsible for managing a team of product managers for around 1.5 Years, which

focused on Price Parity products and Multiple features of Swiggy Instamart.
- In Ola Electric, for around 8 months, he was managing the New User Experience product team which was

responsible for improving user experience using Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality with gamification

of user experience.
- In Grab.in, Product and Engineering teams were together under his team and they managed both product

roadmap and technology roadmap by directly working with the CEO (1.5yrs). There was a team of 10

Product managers in overall which reported to him.
- In Behtar (LMIH Technologies), He was responsible for leading the entire product management

along with the Development team, this team (3 Product Managers) was responsible for the entire product charter of Behtar.

What are the latest trends following in the product and technology space?
- Generative AI & Computer Vision: AI will solve business problems related to CRM, Search, Code Helpers, Industrial

Mining.
- RPA - Release process automation is a very promising field which will be crucial in automating the office functions

and even process management at Warehouses, HR functions, Finance etc.

- Computer Vision: This is a field which will become greatly popular especially in industrial automation and automated quality certification in assembly lines during the manufacturing process.

- Web3 & Blockchain : This is a promising field and Ashish has a keen interest in learning solidity, Principles and generation of genisys blocks and distributed systems at scale with integration of system design with web3 principles, The field has potential to grow beyond cryptocurrencies.

- Mixed cloud Strategy - Companies have started using multi cloud clusters for deployment of applications as one cloud provider does not suffice the

- Cyber Security: With more and more iOT devices and mobile ecosystem growing, Privacy is becoming of utmost importance and hence Cybersecurity is an interesting area which is taking a center stage in all products development.

- IoT : IoT is being implemented in EV manufacturing, Agriculture, Sensor based security solution, Defence, Aerospace etc, and the innovations are making into daily lives of

- Mixed Reality - AR/VR/XR are effectively being used to provide a real time experience for customers and employees for product, supervision, Monitoring, Safety solutions.

- Metaverse > Virtual reality has a lot of potential and is going to be a powerful way

- Quantum Computing > Ability to compute permutations for complex problems is phenomenal with quantum computing and what fascinates me is the ability to perform millions of calculations to help researchers in finding the right solution to real world complex problems and simulations. Ashish feels this is the game changer for hard problems of the future.

- Alternate Energy > EV, Green Hydrogen driven vehicles are becoming quite popular and are the fuel of the future. The trends with Solar energy and alternate batteries technology (like Iron Rust) is really doing well and promising a better solution to current alternate options which we currently have.

- Reduction of carbon footprint in Industries - Consultancies > Carbon reduction in manufacturing and industries is becoming a main focus for large corporate houses and hence there are startups who are helping these houses in reducing the carbon footprint by effective means.

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Scale and changes implemented:
Myntra EORS Sale:
3 million concurrent users at Storefront with order placement concurrency of 20K orders per minute. Ashish has worked and managed the first 10 instances of annual flagship sale of Myntra. This needed a complete redesign of systems (payments, Cart, Wishlist, Product Details, Home Page, Order Management system) with controls in place which can allow us to turn on/Off the features for ensuring there is no downtime in order taking flows.

Myntra Marketplace:

Myntra is india’s leading fashion app, initially myntra use to operate as a online seller, Ashish drove the entire program to convert myntra into a true marketplace which can allow independent sellers to onboard list and sell their products on Myntra App, This was a complete overhaul of a system and was executed against a tight timeline under government of India regulations. Scale 10k RPS, DAU 2Mil, Re Architecture and Redesign of all Platforms under Myntra design system architecture

Swiggy Instamart:

Created Swiggy Instamart from scratch as a separate product for ensuring express deliveries of Grocery using the swiggy mobile app. - Growth to 2L orders a day during Covid lockdown of 2020. Peak RPM of 8K OPM.

Ola Electric - Reduction in Infra Cost: The goal is to maximize saving from cloud and 3rd party observability tools without compromising on granularity of data or on Developer/User Experience with 99.999% availability

- Autoscale up and AutoScaledown of Instances based on Load. - Migration from Java13 to Java 21
- JVM replacement to GralVM
- Introduction of Quarkus for high throughput.

- DB optimisations, DB Archival, Multitenant Architecture
- Caches and CDN introduction for Backend and Frontends
- Query Optimisations
- Migration of account to long term reserved instances.
- MIgration from EMR to Kafka for telematics pipeline.
- Replacement of paid third party monitoring systems like Newrelic, Moengage to Open telemetry and Internal Datalake (Open source) equivalent.
- and Many more

This initiative brought a cost saving of 75% from early expenses of 10cr per month to around 3.7 Cr per month on AWS and Infrastructure expenses.

Technology

What’s his core strength?
- Consumer side products
- Server Side scalable architecture
- Full stack development
- DB and cloud optimisations
- Legacy to Microservices Migration

21 years is too long to pick one over another. His expertise spans across all these 3 heavily. If he must pick the strongest then it is System Architecture and Design, Real time systems, Backend development, then full stack.

Consumer Side experience and expertise as well equally good with years of experience across various domains and various companies at various scales.

Legacy Migrations:

Many instances to call out:

- Myntra Marketplace - Myntra legacy platform was built on PHP, and for migrating myntra’s business model to pure play marketplace with seller’s selling products on platform, This needed complete redesign of system and migrating the legacy platform to Nodejs, J2EE, Golang, Kafka, and NoSql Dbs. This project was executed in one year with complete replacement of the legacy system on new platform.

- Swiggy - Swiggy first version was built using Django (Python Framework), in 2017 swiggy started to clock around 30K orders per day, hence the Django started becoming a bottleneck so Ashish drove the initiative to migrate the Vendor and Fulfillment platforms from Django to Springboot, Golang and Mysql based platform with introduction of Kafka for managing and orchestrating the order taking part at scale.

- Behtar - As VP migrated the Django monolithic platform to Python Fast API based backend separation, This enabled us to onboard the new stores faster and also brought up the stability of the system which was a bottleneck at Behtar stores. Scale 1000+ stores pan india with 1L orders per day across all stores.

- Grab - The goal was to rewrite the entire PHP - Zend based platform with new functionalities and capabilities, With migration of cloud from AWS to Azure, There were too many moving parts in this recreation of platform and hence the complexity was very high, Ashish spearheaded the entire development of platform in React js, Nodejs, golang, Java Springboot, Mongodb, Kafka based new architecture which enhanced the order management capability of system from previous 40k orders a day to 5L orders a day with real time monitoring of the order lifecycle.

- OLA Electric Telematics and Backend - Telematics pipeline is the backbone of electric vehicles and the legacy system was badly written due to code reuse from cab business platforms. Ashish drove and successfully delivered the new telematics pipeline with analytics platform rewrite to manage 1 billion events ingestion from 5L EVs delivered to customers. The technology which was used here was Flink, Apache Pinot, EMQX, Springboot, Kafka, Amazon EMR. to provide real time processing capabilities across all EVs.

Ashish has a deep experience of migrating from legacy monolithic platforms to new scalable technologies, Platform using java, redis and AWS RDS MySql - spanning across Web and Mobile platforms too. He also has multiple experiences of migration of revamping the legacy mobile apps of iOS and Android mobile platforms using native languages (swift and kotlin) replacing React Native for (Myntra, Swiggy, Grab and Ola Electric)

What he is MOST PROUD OF

• ● Implementation of India’s first Chaos Engineering platform for Myntra, Which was a completely new
  engineering concept at the time of 2014 to create a resilient system for handling EORS sale events of
  Myntra.
  
• ● Implementation and Driving the tech Cost optimization exercises across Grab, Ola, Myntra and Swiggy
  systems.
  

● Delivering AB Testing and Feature Flagging platform for Myntra, Which was first of its kind to solve the problem of graceful degradation of system whenever a system goes down, This platform heavily also leveraged the fundamentals of Circuit Breaker, Throttling and Rate Limiting as well within the design.

Motivation

Areas of interest > Ashish has expertise in Ecommerce, Hyperlocal, Logistics, Advertisement, Media Management, but is open to all domains if the problem is challenging.

Comp Details : Reach out on +919900142473 or ashishbajpai.jobs@gmail.com

Any additional information will be furnished upon request.