VP of Engineering

Ardaman S.

Things I value the most:   Teamwork, Agility, Ownership
My execution mantra:       fail fast, succeed often, learn always, and have fun doing it

I believe the five most important responsibilities of a leader are to: 
- Create clarity from ambiguity
- Encourage constructive candor & diversity of perspectives
- Anticipate & break down barriers
- Create opportunities for growth for people
- be Data driven, and Insight led

I have been applying these in my role as a technology *product* leader in building teams and delivering successful SaaS products over the past 15 years. Along the way, I've had the privilege of learning from many brilliant minds in many technology and product domains (e-commerce, IoT, Enterprise, Video).  

I thrive using that breadth of expertise to design scalable systems; drive cross-functional alignment between strategy, UX, product, engineering, and GTM; and deliver products that delight customers.

If you are looking for a list of technology buzzwords I have built products for/with:

Cloud platforms, AWS, CDN, Edge computing, BigData, Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Containers, Microservices, OAuth, Kafka, Stream processing, Spark, Flink, MQTT, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, NoSQL, Postgres, MySQL, Polyglot Persistence, Terraform, ReactJS, Storybook, Figma, Java, Python, Jupyter, CI/CD, DevOps, SRE, Splunk, DataDog, NewRelic, Video streaming (MBR, ABR), Routing, Mulitcast, Anycast, DNS (and definitely some more).

VP Engineering, Solutions

• Drive the technology strategy for the next generation of platform services and transform the monolith into a set of reusable services and data schemas to accelerate development of new features by product teams.

• Scale the team and org structure to support exponential increase in data volume, advanced analysis features, and an expanded number of feature teams.

• Manage R&D and operations of the data platform that powers ad-hoc analytical and batch processing queries for hundreds of customers over petabyte+ of data.

Drive product strategy and execution for multiple SaaS products, with ownership and accountability for Product definition, UX, frontend and backend architecture.

• Endpoint ML: SaaS Machine Learning pipeline to create and deploy Embedded ML applications targeting heterogenous constrained devices at scale. Fully functional ML models for speech recognition and anomaly detection on embedded boards.

• Pelion Space Analytics (https://bit.ly/2BhySZZ): Low-cost, high ROI SaaS service for workspace utilization insights using machine learning enhanced analytics, MQTT ingestion pipeline, LoRa gateways, and multiple sensors including Computer Vision, PIR and Thermal Imaging.

Senior Director, Applied ML & IoT

Single Threaded Owner for Industrial IoT SaaS services with responsibility for product definition, architecture, engineering and operations. Lead teams across three geo locations to deliver a hybrid on-premise to cloud Time Series data service. 

• Time Series data service: Streaming ingestion, storage and analytics service to support 5M+ sensors per second and 1TB per day. Built using Kafka, Cassandra, Apache Apex, Flink, and Spark.
       
• Platform Reliability and Availability Engineering: Improve service reliability, availability and MTTR across the Predix Platform by driving efforts for designing in fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and instrumentation.

Senior Director Software Engineering

Owned engineering and operations efforts for multiple functional areas.

•	Customer Analytics: Development of a data science-based analytics engine to surface behavioral insights about user through textual semantic analysis and activity categorization. Integration of the system with CRM tools to help achieve better sales close rates.

•	Content Operations: Designed the end-to-end technology solution, and ran the day-to-day operations for verifying and publishing daily quizzes to assess users’ knowledge on health topics. Lead a team of 12 researchers and developers.

•	Marketing Operations: Optimized the marketing campaigns using A/B testing of creatives, targeting & messaging, and continual improvement to achieve 5x reduction in CAC.

Head of Engineering

Designed the Network Operations Center (NOC) and Software system for instrumentation and monitoring of all components - Web Services, Routers and Switches, Video Encoders, and set top boxes.

•	Led a cross-functional effort to incorporate instrumentation and monitoring in all stages of dev-test-deploy cycle to ensure smoother integration and production rollout.

•	Managed integration and relationships with all the major CDN vendors - monitor performance, troubleshoot throughput bottlenecks, design and implement alternatives. Use data analytics to drive software and configuration optimizations.

•	Design of the Network Operations Center (NOC), and implementation of a cloud based end-to-end monitoring system for the OTT TV service, bringing performance metrics, instrumentation and log data from Web Services, Video, and Infrastructure into a single view for faster time to resolution.

Sr. Architect, Engineering Operations

Product Owner for Video-on-Demand product offering.
• Create functional specifications and user stories combining customer research with product strategy.  
• Manage product backlog, prioritization and execution rhythm with the development team.
• Drive alignment between Product, Development and UI/UX teams.

Sr. Program Manager, Mediaroom Video-on-Demand, IEB

•  Program for collaborative design of system architecture for Mediaroom (Microsoft’s IPTV solution) deployments in large data centers with contributions from Microsoft, System Integrators and Telcos; with an aim to reduce TCO and development costs.
•  GTM for Mediaroom deployment architecture based on Virtual Servers

Program Manager, Mediaroom Solutions, IEB

•  Led the definition of a global reference deployment architecture for the Microsoft Mediaroom platform (IPTV Edition) encompassing all aspects of the deployment - application, network, infrastructure, security, and operations & management. 

•  As part of the team, engaged members of the worldwide Microsoft Mediaroom Solutions team and core product development to develop the reference architecture. 

•  Developed an automated architecture & deployment design tool based on parameters to scalability and usage profile, to be used by field teams to speed up customer implementations, and internal BI teams for cost estimation.

Solutions Architect, Mediaroom, IEB

Design and implementation of a product pricing recommendation engine for listings on eBay, based on insights from historical data, cyclical trends and competitor pricing.