Ashish Gautam

• Played a vital role in bringing about a culture shift in the organization, overhauled the team from inefficient & underperforming to a high performance team.
• Scaled the platform both infrastructure architecture wise to support 10x load of the state when I joined.
• Managing the Engineering as well as Product charter owning everything about the deliveries and the P&L.
• Managed to bring down the infrastructure costs to almost half by efficiently using the cloud components and hardware.
• Coached the tech managers to become efficient leaders and run the respective teams efficiently.
• Setup a strong analytics stack to review metrics around the system and business to make key decisions.
• Setting up a re-engineering team to rearchitect the system and make it compliant with standard practices and re-building it for scale.

• Responsible for managing the overall software development lifecycle and delivery of product features and programs.
• Managing a team of talented engineers and responsible for their career growth and overall development.
• Responsible for running the programs and business which span across Amazon fulfillment centers worldwide generating a business of $100 million plus running at a large scale.
• Responsible for overall health of the tech stack and the platform which is spread across different geographies, highly scalable, distributed and running it frugally.
• Responsible for stakeholder management across the organization and generating positive outcomes for the business the team is handling.
• Working closely with Product and Program managers to define the roadmap for the team and owning the complete team charter.

Responsibilities:

• Managing a team of 20+ smart engineers, being responsible for their career growth, performance and learning etc.
• Responsible for timely and quality deliveries of project and features.
• collaborating with the Product Managers and multiple business stakeholders and doing over all stakeholder management.
• Responsible for overall architecture, code quality within the team, QA, platform and infrastructure.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to refine the product roadmap and aligning the overall engineering workforce to ship them.
• Represent the engineering team and communicate things to management and multitude of stake holders in an understandable manner.
• Responsible for the overall engineering practices, processes and guidelines which are followed within the team.
• Responsible for the early appraisals for the team and their performance management. Also responsible for overall resource management against the planned business requirements in a pro-active manner.
• Advocating agile practices and ensuring that they are being followed within the team.
• Mentoring Engineers for technical architecture, best practices and helping them to achieve their targets.
  
  Achievements:
  
  
• Scaling up the platform and rearchitecting it to be more flexible and easy to ship changes. Re-writing and shipping code to support business in an efficient and scalable manner.
• Overall revamp of key services to run the business efficiently which includes coupons and discounts platform, product detail pages and 1mg subscription plan.
• Firing inefficient team member from the system and hiring new and efficient people and taking the team to next level in terms of culture, skills and motivation etc.
• Bringing 1mg to the top ranking in almost all the drug keyword searches on google search and increasing organic traffic from less than half a million to more than million a day.
• Taking 1mg subscription plan active users to more than 1 lakh active subscribers from less than 5K in 6 months.
• Initiating load testing culture within the company leading from the front and contributing to scale up multiple service with learning from it.

• Managing a team of developers and senior developers and providing handson leadership to the team.
  
• Conducting scrum meetings and acting as a scrum master and managing the development sprints.
  
• Designing the architectures, conducting code reviews, Setting up coding guidelines and ensure that they are followed.
  
• Coordinate and direct projects, making detailed technological plans to accomplish goals. Develop and implement technical policies and standards for engineering and technical work performed within the team.
  
• The myPAT platform is able to handle more than 30K students giving tests online at the same time where previously before I joined this count was 1500 users. It is auto-scalable like anything today.
  
• Analyse the technology and the resource needs to access the feasibility of the projects.
  
• Recruit, direct, assign the resources, evaluate their work and oversee their development.
  
• Understanding the organization/product vision and making sure the team is on the same page with that. Set technology goals within broad outlines provided by the top management.
  
• Ensuring the best working culture and discipline within the team, regularly conducting one to one meetings with the team mates and rule out any issues within the team and ensure a smooth work process.
  
• Reporting to the CEO & CTO of the company and make sure the technology is aligned to and supports the company’s business goals.
  
• Leading the R&D initiave of the company and constantly doing research to adopt the new and better technologies which boost up the business.
  

• Taking part in day to day development work and diving into code written by team members to provide them guidance and Leading them towards writing a good quality code.
  
• Improving the already existing architecture to make it scalable and design the new architecture for the new product/features of existing product(s)/enhancements in order to achieve scalability and performance. Implemented technologies like server side caching, Queuing (through RabbitMQ), Load balancing etc in order to achieve the same.
  
• Leading the transformation of the PHP-MySQL based platform to a scalable platform based on Node.js, Mongodb, Redis, and multiple technologies which is able to handle more than 20K concurrent users and 2 million monthly active users.
• Driving Enterprise Integration with third parties and their technologies with the exisiting platform.
  
• Leading DevOps Team along with Development team and driving the server management team being the owner of the same(I took up this responsibility myself being Redhat certified in linux and security)
  
• Improving the server infrastructure and working towards minimizing the IT infrastructure costs by planning and implementing best and optimized methodologies for infrastructure management.
  
• Implementing the deployment automation technologies like Jenkins, Analytical tools like Kibana, setting up service alarms to ensure 100% uptime of services.
  
• Working towards the fault tolerance and failure recovery working with the AWS cloud and utilizing its various available services to make sure the products and services run smoothly.
  
• Performance measuring by setting up various matrices in the AWS cloud and provide network consultancy to the internal software development team.
  
• Leading a new product (Crownit Mealcard) as a Technology Leader, owning the technology part and providing mentorship and guidance to the junior developers and also Liasioning between the stakeholders and third parties and technology team.
  
• During this project, developing a deep understanding of prepaid card solution within a very short time span and responsibly plan and drive the whole project.
  
• Making a development plan and make sure it's followed by the team and the timelines are met
  
• Understanding the business requirements and providing the product/feature delivery estimates followed by technical planning and delegate the work among the team.
  
• Understanding the minute technical details and deciding the technical architecture which best suites the business.
  
• Taking special care of scalability and robustness of the product.

• Taking part in development activities related to telephony software and related voice applications.
  
• Developing IVR applications working with Python and telephony switches.
  
• Taking part in testing activities, writing test plans, Integration testing with other third party applications.
  
• Understanding the client requirements and translate them into a robust application within specified timelines.
  
• Estimating the development effort and coordination with various stake holders to ensure a better understanding of the ongoing project. Resolving bugs and queries raised by different stakeholders from time to time and provide a smooth support for the applications. Monitoring the applications and servers and ensuring 100% uptime. Mentoring juniors and provide them with guidance they need and delivering projects through them demonstrating excellent team leading capabilities.
  
• Taking technical interviews in order to facilitate and support the hiring process which in turn ensures to get the best talent in my team according to the project requirements.
  
• Coordinating with clients and making changes to the application as and when required.
  

• Developing software related to IVR and Telephony and taking part in product development related to GPS integrated IVR.
  
• Writing clean, understandable and scalable code which is reliable and robust.
  
• Development of the IVR platform for India's biggest cab service provider and deploying it at the client's datacenter.
  
• Customizing the open source telephony framework (FreeSWITCH) written in C, C++ to make it work with the FreeBSD platform and developing a technology stack over which IVR applications could be developed.
  
• Taking part in open source forums and resolving queries of community and posting queries too in order to get solutions.
  
• Understanding the FreeBSD operating system and its concepts, doing research and deploying and developing fast and scalable applications in that environment.
  

• Managing a product as and responsible for the product as whole entity.
  
• Interfacing with the Development team, Understanding the technologies used, and suggesting the changes towards the betterment of the product.
  
• Interfacing with the sales and marketing team, driving the sales and marketing activities related to the product, market research, identifying key competitors, identifying potential consumers, market analysis, brand analysis, taking part in branding activities with the marketing team, taking part in marketing and strategies discussion with the strategy group of the company.
  
• Defining the processes related to the product and its support, facilitating the smooth product operations.
  
• Handling the delivery of a huge tech project as a project manager which involved interfacing with multiple teams like Development, testing teams and handling client queries acting as a POC for client. Delivering the project well on timelines and ensuring a smooth delivery with training to the client.
  
• Software development @ NextStag : I also dived from time to time as needed in the coding activities to help the company with more hands to fill in for the tech shortage. I successfully delivered a project acting as a software developer (working on LUA, Python and FreeSWITCH) which is running successfully as of today.
  

• Taking part in the product development activities, product roadmap discussions, review meetings etc.
  
• Writing application code which is scalable and reliable.(Mainly in Python, Javascript, Perl and PHP)
• Developing Voice and IVR applications based on open source technologies and frameworks (FreeSWITCH, Asterisk etc.)
  
• Providing support for the product, bug fixing and constantly making efforts to move the product towards robustness and betterment. Providing inputs regarding the product roadmap and how to make the product better.
  
• Later on taking over the mentoring part with the new joiners, providing training, mentorship and leading them in the development activities as a project manager.