Abhishek Ranjan

I am proud to reflect on my time as the Head of Engineering at Pankhuri, a vibrant social live streaming and short video community for women. In this dynamic environment, I was tasked with a dual responsibility: to grow the tech team and to foster a culture of innovation. I successfully expanded the engineering team from a group of 6 into a robust force of 23. Together, we navigated some challenging times, maintaining a stable and committed team with zero attrition. We embarked on a migration journey, transitioning the entire system to a distributed setup that spanned multiple cloud providers, enhancing the scalability of our infrastructure. Under my leadership, we re-platformed the existing app from Flutter to native Android and iOS. We launched new features like Live Sessions and Games, making the platform more interactive and user-friendly. A significant achievement was the creation of ML pipelines for recommendations and gender detection, making our platform more intelligent and customized. We also migrated the backend to Microservices, leveraging languages such as Golang, Java, and Python. We streamlined our DevOps setup, implementing a fully automated Infrastructure as Code setup across multiple clouds and organized the complete CI/CD process to mitigate production failures. Throughout this transformative period, we maintained a high delivery cadence with two releases per week and virtually no backlogs, ensuring continuous value delivery to our users. I am grateful for the opportunities and challenges encountered during my tenure, which allowed me to demonstrate my leadership, technical proficiency, and dedication to fostering a thriving tech culture.

I had the privilege to be among the first members of Sequoia Consulting Group's India team, responsible for setting up the Bangalore Development Centre. By the time I transitioned out in October, I managed an engineering team of 33 professionals and was at the helm of two major product lines. Sequoia Consulting builds product platforms for people-centric companies. We catered to some top firms in the Bay Area, including Netflix and Uber, primarily in the HR and insurance domain. A significant accomplishment during my tenure was leading the Sequoia PX product, which amassed over 150k monthly active users and over 2 million users. I also spearheaded the creation of the Sequoia HRX platform from scratch within a short span of six months. Today, this platform is used by high-profile companies like Snap and Zoom, testament to the team's dedication and hard work. A key part of my role involved establishing and executing the Data Lake architecture. This created a secure Big Data Platform that could be consumed by various applications, reinforcing our data-centric approach. I also oversaw the migration of existing APIs into a microservices architecture, enhancing the scalability and modularity of our systems. Throughout my tenure, I prioritized building a strong team and maintaining architectural integrity. I successfully set up the Sequoia HRX and Data platform team in India, fostering a culture of innovation and teamwork. My time at Sequoia has been incredibly fulfilling, offering rich experiences in leadership, team-building, and product management in a challenging and stimulating environment.

During my tenure at Y Media Labs, I had the opportunity to manage the Backend Engineering team, delivering projects that scaled to serve millions of users. I was fortunate to work on two major projects that allowed me to showcase my skills and grow as a leader. Project: Stone Inc (Aug'18- Jun'19) Stone Inc, one of Brazil's largest payment processors, averaging 30 million transactions per day, offered an exciting challenge. My team and I were tasked with migrating a sizable monolith into adaptable microservices. I successfully led the creation and execution of this plan, helping Stone to adapt to increasing customer demands. We focused on implementing the Microservices for Prepayments and Receivables modules. A notable achievement was automating the complete distributed architecture deployment using Terraform. Throughout the project, we spearheaded a migration plan to transition the system from a private data center to Azure Cloud. The experience with such large-scale cloud migration further solidified my leadership skills and the team's technical capabilities. Project: Watani (Mar'17-Jun'18) Watani, an Intelligent Social City Guide and Advanced Insights Platform for the Government of Saudi Arabia, was an interesting project. The platform served over 1.5 million registered users and around 700 thousand monthly active users. My team and I were responsible for architecting and implementing the system to ensure high availability and performance. We successfully set up the production system, optimizing it for high volume traffic. One of our key contributions was implementing an in-house rule-based geofencing system. This sent automatic notifications based on location and preset rules, providing personalized, location-based experiences to the users. These experiences at Y Media Labs equipped me with invaluable insights and a deep understanding of managing and scaling tech teams and projects. I am incredibly proud of what my team and I achieved during this time.

As a co-founder and founding technologist at Zulu.Social I was responsible for much of the server side platform development from its inception. . More recently my role has evolved to also included the business development function - driving specific initiatives in the Small Medium Brand segment. My vision at Zulu.Social is to create a synergy between platform development and business development that drives unprecedented growth and value to the business.

I started my career at Amadeus straight out of college, joining as one of the early team members working on one of the first large scale projects to be delivered out of the India office for Air Canada. It was a rare opportunity to contribute to a high-impact, global product so early in my career. A defining highlight of my journey was leading the first release of SAMOA, taking it from development all the way to production deployment. In January 2014, we successfully rolled out the product to the LATAM markets, and the response from customers was extremely positive. This chapter at Amadeus will always remain a foundational part of my career, a place where I learned what it takes to build, ship, and scale mission-critical products on a global stage.