Still the guy who wants to know how it actually works.
About Me
I started my career soldering circuits and programming microcontrollers I didn't fully understand yet. Eighteen years later, that hasn't really changed — I'm still the guy who jumps into something he doesn't know how to do, because figuring it out is the actual point and the fun part of it.
How it started
2008-2009
My Engineering journey landed me a corporate job through campus placements in third year of my 4-year engineering course in electronics and telecommunication engineering. Since most campus hiring companies those days weren't big on communicating in timely fashion to campus recruitments, I had to do something in the waiting period of joining Cognizant. A few days after my engineering results, I was standing in front of a classroom. I was doing clock hour lecturer work to past my time at 22. It started as past time and resulted me in spending almost a year there making me a Project Coordinator for the whole college — students from mechanical, civil, every branch, lining up at my lab for project help.
Then, I joined Cognizant, sat through Java training, and quietly designed circuits in my head the whole time. I don't know what it was, the long wait and the sprints chasing the missed bus gave me a strange feeling. Add to that the long queue in lunch lines hardly getting the food before the break finishes, something wasn't working for me there. Nothing wrong in that job, but something was making me feel too small and insignificant there.
I resigned in just 3 months, no regrets — it just wasn't where my mind was at that time, and I was just 23, I had nothing to loose, or so I thought.
Building things, for a very long time
2009-2016
I went home and joined a small makerspace, teaching 8051 microcontroller to engineering students. Within a month, I got to know that the owner of the makerspace wasn't much technical himself, so my learning opportunities were limited there. Then I started my own institute, my goal was to learn various microcontroller chips, and embedded softwares. I started with AVR microcontroller classes. Ten students paid ₹7,000 each in advance. That ₹70,000 for one month felt enormous in 2009 when all my peers were making hardly 20k a month. I bought a lot of kits and started learning and teaching microcontrollers.
Over the next seven years I built and taught more than 500 college projects and installed over 60 industrial systems. Technologies ranged drastically over different semiconductor cores like AVR, LPC2148, Raspberry Pi, robots for agriculture and firefighting, RFID toll systems, GSM relay controls, custom AVR test jigs for industrial clients, Seven segment display for manufacturing firms, IVR systems, display systems. Whenever there's any requirement that came to me, even if I and I hadn't done that yet; I never said no to something.
I was always building the plane after jumping.
One of those leaps was building the first hardware prototype for a Pune based startup called CarIQ, it was reading data from an OBD2 port of a car, something I had no clue how to do until I did it. It worked well enough that they got funded. Then, just as naturally, they didn't need me anymore. That's happened to me more than once, but that's a nice lesson.
The startup years
2017-2019
In 2017 I caught up with the startup bug. I wasn't solving any specific problem but by that time, I was so passionate about technology that I thought it's my responsibility to put tech toys in young hands before they get a phone. I built a robot which we called as "Playme" and started selling it through our own institute, I needed money to scale it. I got enrolled in a startup incubation program in a college at Pune. They assigned me 2 mentors, folks with such experiences that I won't be able to network with on my own. They're really great individuals and am still in touch with them.
My mentors eventually talked me out of hardware startup idea by explaining me all the pitfalls of it and pushed me toward creating online courses. I started making them to show I can do it alongside my regular project work for clients. I started recording everything that I had worked on till date and whatever that I was learning on the go, which over next few years, resulted in me publishing 12 online courses on Udemy.
Then in 2018, an investor who'd committed ₹50 lakh backed out at the last minute. I was in deep financial troubles with little money to rent or start over with other ideas. I won't dress that period up — it was the lowest point of my life, and there were moments I didn't see a way through it. A friend, who'd also been my industrial client, gave me a job and lent me money to survive.
During these years, I also started delivering corporate trainings via various e-learning companies, both online and on-site trainings on Internet of Things and Machine Learning with Python, it was tiring, but financially rewarding work and it connected me much closely with corporate world. I delivered trainings for approximately 3 years to various companies across India and abroad.
Building again
2019-2022
At this company I did some of the best work of my career which utilized technology to the fullest, I applied all the knowledge I had mustered around cloud computing, databases, business intelligence and coupled that with all my embedded systems and IoT background to deliver some of the best works of my life. A CNC machine monitoring system on Raspberry Pi, a complete plant energy monitoring dashboard pulling Modbus data off the shop floor utility metering and solar system. A material tracking system, barcode and load-cell systems. When Covid hit, I also helped build a ventilator for another manufacturer in Waluj. None of it was glamorous. All of it was real hard engineering, and I loved doing it.
2022-today
After Covid, a friend and I pitched JLL for an outsourcing contract for their software work. They offered me a job instead. I took it, in 2022, and I've been there since working with the best client portfolio that JLL has, Amazon, Meta, and now Google's TRIRIGA platform, building a 14-person SRE team from nothing and leading the entire 70+ headcount India operation.
What I didn't expect was how much my struggling years would matter here. I can sit across from a VP in Seattle running the largest e-commerce business in the world or someone in Ireland at the largest social network, or a leader in Hyderabad at the largest tech company on earth and actually connect the dots for them, in language that makes sense to them, while still working shoulder to shoulder with my own developers and platform engineers in the technical weeds. Years spent running a business gave me an edge when communicating to our clients and understand their needs and my technical brain was quick to address these issues working with my team.
I don't think of myself as the favorite corporate jargon term leader. But I definitely think of myself as an excellent manager and team builder in a way that I have the knack to bring the best out of people. Everyone is skilled and absolute best at something and average at other tasks. All my years managing many people at JLL helped me understand this skill of mine, I was able to deliver the best possible work using my team for clients.
On the client side, I think of myself as someone who understands what they actually need to know and helps them get there. Years of explaining microcontrollers and machine learning to corporate clients built that muscle long before I knew I'd need it for boardrooms.
And I still love technology for its own sake, not just embedded systems; Cloud Computing, Architecture, BI, data pipelines, all of it. One night during my corporate training years, I unknowingly had left an Azure Stream Analytics service running, even with no real messages flowing through it. It cost me ₹20,000. I experienced the common phrase in cloud computing industry - You pay even if you sneeze in cloud.
I actually do love businesses and the problems they solve for the customer, but more so I love building, and I love being the person who can stand between deep technology and the people who need to make decisions about it; translating one into the other.
I'm not chasing money. I've chased it before, when I was desperate, and it didn't make me happy even when it showed up. What I'm chasing is the next thing worth figuring out from zero, and the next person who needs someone to make the complicated thing make sense for them and take informed decisions about technology.
If you've read this far and want the formal version — titles, dates, dashboards — my CV is linked below. But this is the actual story.