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.
How it started
Three days after my engineering results, I was standing in front of a classroom. I became a lecturer at 22, and within a year I was Project Coordinator for the whole college — students from mechanical, civil, every branch, lining up at my lab for project help.
Then I did the sensible thing for about two months. I joined Cognizant, sat through Java training, and quietly designed circuits in my head the whole time. I left after two months. No regrets — it just wasn't where my mind was.
Building things, badly at first, for a very long time
I went home and joined a small makerspace, learning 8051 by debugging it live with students who knew about as much as I did. Then I started my own thing — AVR classes, even though I knew zero AVR. Ten students paid ₹7,000 each in advance. That ₹70,000 felt enormous in 2009. I bought kits and learned by burning through them.
Over the next seven years I built and taught more than 500 college projects — AVR, LPC2148, Raspberry Pi, robots for agriculture and firefighting, RFID toll systems, GSM relay controls, custom AVR test jigs for industrial clients, IVR systems, display systems, whatever someone needed and I hadn't done yet. I never said no to something just because I didn't know it.
One of those leaps was building the first hardware prototype for a Pune startup called CarIQ — reading data off an OBD2 port, 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, and it took a while to understand why.
The startup years, and the fall
In 2017 I caught the startup bug. An incubator in Pune assigned me a mentor, and I built PlayMe — an educational robot, chasing the same energy as Edison and Makeblock. It was never very good. My mentors eventually talked me out of hardware startups entirely and pushed me toward online courses, mostly to get me to stop. I started making them just to quiet them down — and ended up genuinely enjoying it. They even made money.
Then in 2018, an investor who'd committed ₹50 lakh backed out at the last minute. I was deep in loans, with no money for rent, no work, and the project business had already dried up. 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 a client, gave me a job and lent me money to survive. I'm not sure where I'd have landed without that.
Building again, because that's what actually works for me
At her company I did some of the best work of my career — a CNC machine monitoring system on Raspberry Pi, an energy monitoring dashboard pulling Modbus data off the shop floor, a material tracking system, barcode and load-cell systems. When Covid hit, I helped build a ventilator for a manufacturer in Waluj. None of it was glamorous. All of it was real, and I loved doing it.
After Covid, a friend and I started an IT company. I remember consciously deciding I didn't want to build embedded systems as a long-term offering again — not because I'd stopped loving it, but because every time I'd tried to turn that love into a sustainable company, it had broken something. We pitched JLL for an outsourcing contract. They offered me a job instead. I took it, in 2022, and I've been there since — Amazon, then Meta, then Google's TRIRIGA platform, building a 14-person SRE team from nothing.
What I didn't expect was how much my teaching years would matter here. I can sit across from a VP in Seattle running the largest e-commerce business in the world, 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. I don't think of myself as a "leader." I think of myself as someone who understands what people actually need to know, and helps them get there. Years of explaining 8051 to confused students 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, BI, architecture, all of it. One night during my Edureka years, I left an Azure Stream Analytics service running just to see what would happen, with no real messages flowing through it. It cost me ₹20,000. I didn't even mind. That's still basically how I'm wired.What I've learned about myself, the hard way, repeatedly
I don't actually love business. 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. Every single time something I loved turned into "now scale it, hire for it, run it as a company," the joy drained out and the thing started failing, no matter how good I was at the craft itself. Vidya Technology Solutions. PlayMe. Kitflix, if I'm honest with myself. And every time something stayed pure creation, or pure connection — teaching, prototyping, architecting inside someone else's structure, sitting between engineers and executives — I thrived, and the money mostly took care of itself.
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.
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.