Venugopal Menda
Hyderabad
Summary
Dynamic Technical Manager with proven track record at Dremio, showcasing exceptional leadership and commitment to customer success.
Overview
14
14
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Manager - Technical Support - APAC/EMEA/US-EAST
Dremio
12.2018 - Current
- I'm a Technical Manager in Dremio's Support department, where I also oversee Managed Services for the region.
- I joined in November 2018 as the first Support Engineer for APAC and EMEA, working in a high-intensity startup environment and wearing multiple hats-customer support, CSM-like responsibilities, early-stage professional services, RSA work for key accounts, and deep involvement in POCs and onboarding.
- I later moved into leadership, scaled the support team from 2 to 10 engineers, and delivered ~30% of global support work from India at about 1/5 the cost of other regions.
- The team achieved strong throughput, and I maintained team cohesion & retention.
- I helped shape an organisational restructuring, introduced a tiered support model, and created hiring strategies from interns to Product Support Specialists.
- Also built a 4-member Managed Services team from scratch, defining the structure, roles, and operating model.
- Reporting directly to CEO while collaborating closely with CXO team.
- In the last 1.5 years, I've helped hire technical managers and an Operations Manager and have mentored them, along with several internally promoted team members.
- I run Support QBRs and quarterly planning, and I initiated a data-driven operating model that turned the department into an AI-enabled hub.
- Evaluated multiple AI products, drove the Responsible AI journey, and helped enable ASK-AI and RUNLLM, which contributed to about 20% faster resolutions and higher customer engagement.
- Under this model, I helped increase CSAT from 3% to 10%.
- I also own support operations, drive automation initiatives, and regularly share key metrics with the team to maintain transparency, and focus on outcomes.
- I work closely with Engineering and Product Management through quarterly PI planning, prioritizing customer issues to deliver fixes and features within three-month timelines.
Technical Account Manager
MapR Technologies
08.2015 - 11.2018
- Managed Technical support issues of MapR Hadoop deployed on 100+ PB of data over 5000+ nodes.
- Hands-on troubleshooting of Hadoop core ecosystem (YARN, Hive, HBase, MapR-DB, Zookeeper).
- Bare-metal benchmarking of distributed file systems.
- Customer management, Sales and engineering collaboration.
- Datacenter build and operate experience in EMC storage & backup hardware.
- Distributed filesystems design, installation & Operations.
- Large-scale data migrations.
- Performance optimisations on distributed systems.
- Build, Operate highly scalable and high-performing distributed clusters.
- Disaster recovery design, RTO & RPO management.
- Vendor Management - EMC, MapR, Cloudera, CISCO.
System Administrator - Datacenter Build & Operate
HCL Infosystems
05.2012 - 08.2015
- Managed server configurations and performed system upgrades for improved performance.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to implement IT solutions enhancing operational efficiency.
- Conducted regular system backups to ensure data integrity and availability for recovery.
- Oversaw storage management, data migration, backups and drive replacements.
- Performed regular backups of critical data and documents.
- Coordinated with third-party vendors for resolution of incidents or provisioning services.
- Managed storage solutions, including NAS and SAN, optimizing data accessibility and redundancy.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering -
Acharya Nagarjuna Univercity
Guntur04-2008
Skills
- Startup execution and leadership
- Strategic hiring and finance
- AI-driven initiatives
- Data-driven decision making
- Customer success and satisfaction
- Managed services and operations
- Data center management
- Distributed systems expertise
- Cloud services (AWS/Azure)
- Container orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes)
Certification
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
- EMC Proven Professional Certified ISMV2
Languages
English
Proficient (C2)
C2
Hindi
Proficient (C2)
C2
Telugu
Native
Native
Timeline
Manager - Technical Support - APAC/EMEA/US-EAST
Dremio
12.2018 - Current
Technical Account Manager
MapR Technologies
08.2015 - 11.2018
System Administrator - Datacenter Build & Operate
HCL Infosystems
05.2012 - 08.2015
Bachelor of Engineering -
Acharya Nagarjuna Univercity