GURU KINI

Fincity was a new-age Financial Services marketplace that served as a one-stop shop for all the financial needs of a customer. The initial focus was on home loans. There was a suite of products I was accountable for – for consumers side, for lenders, CRMs for relationship managers, for Real Estate Developers, for Channel Partners, along with deep integrations with Facebook and Real Estate Portals.
As a CTO and I was responsible for the product strategy and execution.

Key focus areas:

• Hiring, team management , defining company-wide OKRs
• Ideating, market research, and building the product and SaaS strategy
• Interviewing customers, including lenders (banks/NBFCs), Real Estate Developers, Channel Partners, Relationship Managers, etc to define upcoming requirements
• Followed the Customer Development process
• Defining the product roadmap and execution – agile development processes, CI pipelines, code & architectural reviews, UX definition, Cloud deployment, OCEN & AA initiatives
• Integrating with Real Estate portals, Bank systems, third party services and vendors for telephony, messaging, marketing workflows, etc
• Building models for analyzing the loan eligibility and risk profile of each application

Key Achievements:

• Peak Loan sanctions to the tune of ₹ 25 Crores/month, with an average of ₹ 12 Crores/month
• Loans worth over ₹ 100 Crores disbursed in 6 months of MVP
• Real Estate worth over ₹ 100 Crores purchased through the Fincity SmartAsset channel
• Around 200,000 leads processed digitally through the system, over 1.5 billion hits across all campaigns
• Production downtime was less than 2 minutes/year
• Lead to Sanction period reduced from 12 days to ~3 hours

Other Keywords: Loan Digital processing, eKYC, Risk Analysis, CRM, SaaS, Microservices, Data Engineering

YML is a leading technology and design partner for digital products headquartered in the Bay Area.
I joined in a cross-functional role that cut across the various layers of the company including delivery and sales. I have formed and led a team of around 70 in the disciplines of Cloud technologies (chiefly backend), QA, Product, and DevOps.

In addition, I served as the SME for Healthcare , Blockchain , Data Privacy , and Security for the whole organization

Key focus Areas:

• Definition and implementation of engineering processes across all engineering and product functions
• Owned processes for code quality , test automation, CI/CD pipelines , software security, data privacy, and performance
• Evaluating, building, and introducing new tools for monitoring product quality
• Overseeing end-to-end project execution from pre-sales to post-market stages
• Driving org-wide Test Automation initiatives

Key Achievements:

• Built an automated quality grader that considered 60+ data points from Jira, Git, Test Results, observability tools to aid the managers analyze the quality of the products before and after go-live
• Post market defects were reduced by over 65% in 3 months
• Built a customizable test automation framework for mobile apps, based on Appium & Cucumber – this detected over 5000 defects across 12 products in 12 months
• Established a Remote Device testing lab within the premises linked with the CI/CD pipelines
• Established centers of excellence for Blockchain, Cloud Services, and Test Automation
• Set up the Product function from scratch to around 8 people

Other Keywords: Cloud Services, Project Management, Business Analysis, Blockchain, Product Management, Processes, Quality, Technical Debt Management

• Joined as the head of the ODC for a top consulting firm
• My key tasks were to manage 5 different teams, with 40 engineers in all
• The ODC was an innovation wing where the focus was to leverage up and coming technologies like Blockchain , Machine Learning , NLP and Big Data to solve real-world problems in the areas of finance, taxation, and audit
• Additionally, I was also taking care of all the operational tasks for the ODC

Other Keywords: Blockchain, Ethereum, Project Management, Team Building

Cognito is a startup in the Internet of Things ( IoT ) space which was founded in the Bay Area in 2014. I provided technical suggestions on the overall architecture on the server and gateway side of things.

This was an advisory role.

Other Keywords: Internet of Things, Product Architecture, API Management, Consulting

Ideated and built an engine for Personal Health Record ( PHR ) management. ZeePHR was built as an open platform to which all the players in the healthcare sector (doctors, pharmacies, hospital, diagnostic labs, etc.) can publish data to and can access data from (after the user authorization)

• ZeePHR allows users and healthcare providers to create, maintain and track health regimes for medication, exercise, diet, etc
• The ZeePHR backend is designed to be a self-learning that can “connect the dots” from the users' healthcare data and come up with predictive and trend analysis that may be helpful to the doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc
• As a co-founder and CTO, I was responsible for team building, overall architecture, monetization channels, app ideas and integrations with third-party systems

Other Keywords: Healthcare, System Architecture, Product Management, Machine Learning, Team Building, AWS, Data Security, Clinical Decision Systems (CDS), Data Engineering

• E-Cosmos Solutions offers various services and products in the US Healthcare domain.
• Their flagship product, Dr. Kare, was a comprehensive Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system.
• As the VP of their Products division, my main task is to plan for the product evolution and work towards creating a whole suite of healthcare products that will complement the EMR (e,g., Pain Management, PHR, DIRECT messaging, Bed Management)
• Successfully re-engineered the solutions to be modular and to support both on-prem and cloud-based deployments.
• Certified the products for ARRA Meaningful Use Stages I & II

Other Keywords: Healthcare, Team Building, Business Analysis, Product Strategy, HL7 RIM, CCDA, Interoperability

SpurTree Technologies is a services outfit, founded in 2010 in Bangalore. I joined on board to help SpurTree establish engineering processes and a sound Product Development business unit.

• Established the Healthcare vertical from scratch and oversaw the overall SDLC of web, client-server, and mobile solutions in the (US) Healthcare (and later, Retail) spaces
• Provided consultation to Healthcare ISVs, hospitals, TPAs and other healthcare entities on issues of compliance with various standards such as ARRA Meaningful Use , HIPAA , PCI DSS, etc. Also helped these clients achieve full compliance
• The role kept me very close to the realities and challenges of various tech platforms including .Net , J2EE, Android, iOS, and mobile web with scalable cloud-based infrastructure with Azure and AWS
• Developed processes and check-points based on best practices for scope and quality management
• Commissioned and managed reusable software components for standard usage
• Directed the overall strategy for my unit and worked very closely with Sales and Operations teams to exploit upcoming opportunities

Other Keywords: ARRA-MU (Stages I & II), HL7 Messaging implementation, Healthcare Secure Messaging (DIRECT Project), API Management, Portfolio Management, Pre-Sales, SNOMED

As an architect, I was responsible for studying, architecting and designing the various incoming requirements for Middleware packages in Symbian OS.

• Point person for all cross-team efforts in teams to build middleware solutions in UPnP, DLNA, NFC , Bluetooth , WLAN, USB, etc.; collectively called Local Connectivity
• Also served as global Product Owner for Local Connectivity
• Represented my middleware components as Package Owner at Symbian Foundation; focusing on eliciting and managing open-source contributions

Other Keywords: OS Middleware Architecture, API Design, Security & Cryptography, Product quality, Agile & Scrum, writing White Papers

Systems Engineering Team was a division of the Symbian System Architecture group, which was responsible for the overall Architectural evolution of the Symbian OS. I led a team of hand-picked engineers who focused on several OS UI, middleware and internals aspects to root out inefficiencies. Speed and RAM consumption were the key parameters for optimization.

• Built a team from scratch and trained them in the Performance Engineering discipline
• Led the team in evaluating the impact of overhauling the memory allocation algorithm for the OS – a critical project that would have needed analysis of the entire OS
• Interacting with the managers and architects in other teams, appraising them of the identified performance bottlenecks and discussing potential solutions
• Conducting Performance Engineering sessions with Symbian and partner companies (including Motorola, TI, Nokia, etc.) to analyze performance related threats and opportunities in upcoming hardware platforms

Other Keywords: People Management, Public Speaking, Team Building, Cross-functional communication, OS Internals.

• I spent several years working at mobile OS middleware at Symbian, where I was responsible for the design and implementation in several projects including implementing Mobile Device Management (MDM), FOTA, Data Sync
• Introduced Scrum to the team
• Responsible for the overall delivery and for defining the personal development plans for my team of 14 engineers
• Very actively involved in training and up-skilling in the Bangalore office. Conducted 20+ sessions on various technical and personal management topics
• I have personally mentored 40+ graduates and inducted them as productive members in the various teams

• I started my career building control systems for various machine automation projects, usually using VC++. I had the chance to work in several verticals including automobiles, mining (safety control), manufacturing, space programs (strain gauges for rockets), textiles, hospitality industry, healthcare systems, medical transcription, etc.
• I also worked on a wide range of technologies in this phase including smart cards, cryptography protocols, .Net and .Net Compact Framework and Symbian platforms for handheld devices