Rahul Kumar Lodha
Engineer Turned Farmer
Chakulia, Jharkhand
Summary
Having worked in the software industry from 17 years across the world, I have taken on challenging roles and responsibilities and have delivered on it. Now, it's time to take on the world most challenging problem of current times - Climate change and peace. So, have started learning afresh from nature - our own mother earth.
Overview
17
17
years of professional experience
4
4
years of post-secondary education
Work History
Co-Founder and CEO
Urveera Sustainable Learning and Development Pvt. Ltd.
Chakulia, Jharkhand
07.2021 - Current
- Having a vision of sustainable rural development - "Wise village" and in the process learning several aspects of it.
- Manufacturing vermicompost in a sustainable manner - for sustainable and regenerative agriculture.
- Co-learning with kids to do terrace gardening with a vision to disrupt food supply chain and bring social transformation.
- Working on sustainable housing by building using locally procured natural materials, renewable energy, waste management, permaculture and women empowerment.
- Improving the bio-diversity by planting various local species of trees.
- Learning from nature.
Chief Technology Officer
Aakash Edutech Pvt. Ltd.
Gurugram
07.2020 - 04.2021
- Directed 85 member technology team's complex project development and functionality objectives.
- Facilitated ongoing team development and growth through training and professional skills enhancement and smooth hiring process.
- Designed enterprise-level technological blueprints and system architectures to migrate from an old technology stack.
- Ensured smooth technology merger with BYJU's
- Briefed executives on technology risks and suggested ways to alleviate concerns.
Head of Engineering
Kargo Technologies - Logistics
Jakarta
09.2019 - 05.2020
- Led the entire engineering team of 35 SDE1/2 across all skillsets & squads. Regular 1:1s helped me a lot.
- Went extra-mile to quickly blend to a new diverse culture and collaborated well with all stakeholders
- Adopted latest tech stack e.g Functional programming in Elixir, Phoenix, Postgres, GraphQL, Drone CI, Terraform
- Defined and successfully executed 3 quarterly Engineering OKRs aligned to company’s OKRs
- Executed scrum process with special focus on collaboration, documentation and planning
- Led entire hiring rigorously with intension of setting up development centre in India with blended culture
- Provided domain expertise on product, business and HR and played key role in securing Series A funding.
Vice President Engineering
Rivigo - Logistics
Gurgaon
03.2018 - 09.2019
- Headed technology for Freight Marketplace; Built 6 high performing agile teams and grew the team from 20 to 70 by hiring at all levels - SDE1 to DoE/VP - across BE, FE, Mobile, DevOps, Testing, Data Science,
- Product, UX and Support; delivered features at pace with quality to ensure 5x business growth in 1 year
- Led Freight Demand, Fleet Supply, Payments, CRM, Goal App, Data Science and Finance product and engineering charters: Scaled from 25 to 60 Micro-services while working on reliability, scalability and maintainability
- Facilitated deeper learning and execution of several micro-services architectural patterns/practices - DDD, DB per service, Domain Events, Event Sourcing, CQRS, Aggregates, Restful resources, Saga & Circuit Breakers
- Created a polyglot tech environment (Java, Golang and Python); introduced these in tech stack - ELK, RxJava, ElasticSearch, Prometheus, Docker, WebSockets, Uber’s H3 Library, etc
- Facilitated business and product thinking within engineering teams by frequent user research and asking meaningful questions w.r.t Data, fitness function and business model
- Encouraged active participation in Rivigo Hackathon; Mentored 3 award winning teams
- Represented company in 4 Campuses - IIT Delhi, Roorkee, BHU; IIIT Allahabad for Seminars, PPT and Hiring
- Drafted Rivigo Tech Guiding Principles and built consensus towards making Rivigo a tech company
- Led company wide tech mastery program for TDD, Micro-services and Monitoring
- Actively involved in problem solving, debugging, design/architecture, code reviews and performance optimisation.
Vice President Technology
MobiKwik - Fintech
Gurgaon
06.2017 - 02.2018
- Led entire engineering - Payments, Recharges, Merchants, Hotels, Bus Tickets, Reimbursement Product, Data Engineering, Payment Gateway and Lending, serving over 50 Million users and merchants
- Strengthened the technology team from 50 to 75
- Improved the quality of hires and offer-to-joining-ratio from 40% to 60% by some fundamental changes in hiring process
- Conducted 5 on-campus drives as well
- Instrumented Agile training for 90 people across Engineering, Product, UX & DevOps functions and restructured cross-functional teams to self-managing pod teams (mini-startups), which has started to show benefits in ownership, quality, planning, velocity, less frictions and overall in culture
- Led data science & machine learning teams to use wallet transactions & other alternate big data to create user profiles for several use cases - user retention, personalization, reminders and lending
- Introduced concept of Minimal Viable Technology for decisions; created tech guilds for MongoDB, Kafka, Rest APIs and conducted trainings; improved coding practices and mandated code review across all teams
- Got in-depth knowledge of payments ecosystem by deep involvement in these key projects: (a) Create demand/supply for KYC; store Aadhaar data in vault; GST compliance; post new regulations.(b) Enable payment through PG when wallet balance is low/disallowed; used SOA (c) Improving success rates of MobiKwik Payment Gateway and some key integrations (d) Route Recharges & Bill Payments through BBPS (Bharat Bill Payment System) (e) Complete breakup of Escrow balance and other ~35 reconciliations (f) Co-branded wallets from Bajaj, BSNL and IndusInd Bank.
Co-Founder & CTO
Renomania
New Delhi
10.2015 - 05.2017
- Home interior content discovery platform and a marketplace for home improvement professionals, contractors and home product brands & stores
- Hired a lean team of 15 smart developers - 4 in-house core developers, 4 trainees and 7 Freelancers
- Took over charge of complete technology for website from our third party technology vendor
- Revamped the entire website and created the iOS and Android apps
- Experimented with various revenue models such as Premium Listing, Ads, Lead generation and Affiliates of which last 2 were most promising
- Developed several products in all interfaces such as listing of photos, professionals and brands; blogs; search, filters and ranking powered by Solr v4; generic & sophisticated leads matching algorithm; Chat between professionals and users; home and kitchen product catalog from Amazon & Flipkart; Photo tagging with products for inspiration driven shopping experience; analytics dashboard for internal and external users; portfolio websites for professionals, Payments, etc
- Saved marketing cost by improving organic search 3x by doing several SEO improvements
- Hands-on responsibility of entire DevOps on AWS
- Scaled website’s monthly traffic from 80K to 510K with a planned downtime of total 5 mins in 1.5 years
- Played a key role in strategic decisions e.g
- Business model, financial projections, pitch deck, product/ technology roadmaps, HR, sales & digital marketing, budgeting and pitched to more than 10 VC/PE funds
- Featured in NDTV Prime’s Program: Unicorn - Chasing the Start-Up Dream.
Vice President Engineering
Info Edge
08.2014 - 10.2015
- Delivered ~27% YoY growth in revenue by executing these 18 projects - Digital Marketing for clients (Mass Mailer Management, Banner Management System, SEM, Pay Per Click Campaigns), Listings (Verified & Featured Listings, Crawler, Owner Acquisition Automation), Lead Management System, User Accounts, RESTful APIs, Deployment using Capistrano, Deals, Shortlist, Call Patching, Dealers and Property Alerts
- Led 3 development teams comprising of total 17 members
- Spearheaded these key initiatives - Agile, release process, monitoring of engg Biz metrics, data centre migration, knowledge sharing sessions, annual tech awards and authentic performance appraisals dialogue
- Reduced reported bugs by 45% by driving unit testing and ensuring better code reviews as per guidelines
- Re-architected and fixed lead search module for high availability, performance, reliability and scalability
- Used breadth of technology/frameworks/tools – LAMP, Java, Python, JavaScript, MVC - CodeIgniter, Symfony,
- MongoDB, AWS, NewRelic, Zabbix, Graphite-StatsD, Pentaho, Google Analytics and collaborated with several 3rd parties – Knowlarity, Zedo, Proxymesh, GTM, Adwords APIs, RareMedia for Property Verification Android App
- Led engineering initiatives: Lead marketplace, deals/GOSF, variable lead pricing, user profiling (targeted mailers).
Principal Engineer
Tribune Digital Ventures
Bangalore
11.2013 - 07.2014
- Overhauled complete backend for www.zap2it.com by rewriting content ingestion pipeline for blogs, video, photo galleries, TV schedules and used Drupal for CMS, Varnish for caching, Ooyala and Gigya 3rd parties.
Tech Lead
Yahoo
Bangalore
05.2011 - 11.2013
- Led the development of recommendation engine using content-based filtering for Y! Travel, Homes and Auto. (a) Designed and developed ranking logic and YQL APIs for Content-to-Product and P2P recommendation (b) Coded PIG Latin scripts, Oozie WFs, UDFs for calculating popularity of Travel entities (e.g Hotel, Destination) from TerraBytes of page views data; deployed in Hadoop grid which uses Map/Reduce
- Developed Yahoo! Shopping backend that involving product ingestion and classification into categories using machine learning in Hadoop, Vespa search, REST APIs (response time < 100ms) and recommendations
- Carbon Feeder, a distributed and fully hosted framework, using which any Yahoo! vertical can plug in their business logic to process the Carmot (Content Agility Serving platform) ChangeLog and feed the transformed CCM objects to their desired destinations within 1 minute of change
- Led the project end-to-end and on-boarded 3 key customers in 3 quarters: Y! Realestate, Events, Autos.
Sr. Software Engineer
Network Domain Companies
Bangalore
07.2004 - 05.2011
- Worked at Sonus Networks, Juniper Networks and Samsung India Software Operations
- Learnt and developed products using several network protocols of top 5 layers (out of 7) of OSI Model - SIP, HTTP, Diameter, IP, TCP, UDP, SCTP, MSRP, G722.1 & MSRTA wide-band codecs, ISDN and other RFCs/3GPP specs
- Developed several systems using C/C++ in IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) which built the foundation of VoLTE. (a) Server Side: HSS, CSCF, Diameter ALG, Internet B2BUA, VCC, IMX (App Server platform), Session Border Controller (GSX), Rich Communication Suite, MLPP, etc. (b) Client Side: Application engines for Linux Mobile (LiMo) - P2P Video Share, Presence, PTT over cellular; o Middleware: OpenClovis - HA, Notifications, Log, Information Model Management, Event, Checkpoint
- Developed Management Daemon - responsible for Juniper’s router configurations and operations
- Collaborated with HQ teams of South Korea, US and Norway and global customers in their labs e.g KT Labs, West Corp, Hafslund, Agnity & JCOM and worked on very high scale systems e.g 2.5 Million BHCA load passed
Education
B.Tech - Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering
IIT Kharagpur
Kharagpur 07.2000 - 05.2004
Skills
Software development
Additional Information
- India Patent # 263920: A method for handling supplementary services in an IP Multimedia Sub-System.
- Publications: (a) ‘Carbon Feeder - A Pluggable Framework for Carmot Changelog Processing’ for Yahoo! TechPulse in Nov 2011. (b) ‘Personalised recommendations for Yahoo! Homes’ for Yahoo! TechPulse in July 2013.
- Taught 250 IIT-JEE aspirants in summer 2001;
- Continually awarded scholarship at IIT;
- Participated in socio- cultural/sports events - Volleyball, Antakshari, Dramatics, NCC Camps;
- Top 0.1% in Maths in the country.
- Distinguished Speaker - “Empowering Young Entrepreneurs” by IIT E-cell and “Career Conclave” at IIT-D.
- Fire Fighter & Best Performer Team in Yahoo! & Sonus respectively for excellent work. Spot Award for recognition from Samsung HQ, Korea for my work in HSS project.
- Piezo-resistive MEMS Accelerometer Sensor developed at MEMS Lab in IIT Kharagpur is now displayed at Visvesvaraya Museum, Bengaluru and a lecture was introduced by Prof. S. Kal in Electronics on my research.
Timeline
Co-Founder and CEO
Urveera Sustainable Learning and Development Pvt. Ltd.
07.2021 - Current
Chief Technology Officer
Aakash Edutech Pvt. Ltd.
07.2020 - 04.2021
Head of Engineering
Kargo Technologies - Logistics
09.2019 - 05.2020
Vice President Engineering
Rivigo - Logistics
03.2018 - 09.2019
Vice President Technology
MobiKwik - Fintech
06.2017 - 02.2018
Co-Founder & CTO
Renomania
10.2015 - 05.2017
Vice President Engineering
Info Edge
08.2014 - 10.2015
Principal Engineer
Tribune Digital Ventures
11.2013 - 07.2014
Tech Lead
Yahoo
05.2011 - 11.2013
Sr. Software Engineer
Network Domain Companies
07.2004 - 05.2011
B.Tech - Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering
IIT Kharagpur
07.2000 - 05.2004