Akshat Verma

Building world's largest travel distribution platform at TBO. 20+ years of experience building scalable consumer-facing applications as well as deep tech systems in the space of data science, cloud computing and distributed systems. My work has received three Test of Time (10 year best paper) awards and one Best Paper Award. I spent the first 14 years of my career at IBM Research solving important research problems on the intersection of distributed systems, cloud and data science and applying them to IBM products and services. My work led to numerous papers (40+) and patents (30+) with considerable research impact (7000+ citations), led to major features in multiple IBM products, and created new service engagements. I received IBM’s Outstanding Innovation Award and ACM Middlware’s 10 year best paper award for my work on cloud analytics and virtual machine consolidation. I spent the next 8 years in industry applying the same computer science principles to solve real world problems. I was responsible for all engineering related to hotels for Makemytrip and its foreign subsidiaries, and built the core pricing and supply platforms at Makemytrip. I received Makemytrip’s highest honor for this work. I built the digital engineering team at Airtel from 30 to 170+ talented engineers and engineering leaders. I led some of the most significant and highest impact projects at Airtel during this time and received Airtel’s highest recognition, the Chairman Award, for all three years at Airtel. Subsequently, I joined Trilogy as a Portfolio CTO/EVP (highest technical position at Trilogy group) and was responsible for the product roadmap, architecture and strategy of multiple products in the Trilogy portfolio working closely with a fully remote team. Subsequently, I experimented with a couple of startup ideas in the EdTech and HealthTech space. I enjoy setting engineering practices to drive efficiency for large teams, often globally distributed, as well as working in a hands-on fashion with small teams building systems from scratch.