Amazon Development Centre (India) Pvt. Ltd., Hyderabad

Technology leader in different roles

14 years 4 months [(Aug 2014 – Dec 2021) & (Jan 2007 – Nov 2013)]

Core Transportation Technology

Technical Program Management

• Owned and delivered self-service product vision for Shippers and Carriers of Amazon Retail.

• Defined and owned the vision, strategy and operational planning for multiple products and engineering org of 500+ sizes.

WW Returns & Re-commerce Technology

Technical Program Management

• Delivered label-less and package-less customer returns globally.

• Optimized transportation costs by driving tech programs relevant for in-store returns and container consolidations.

• Managing the software development team and overseeing the work of its engineers, including the delegation of tasks and resolution of complex escalations;

• Establishing the roadmap for the technology platform in alignment with business strategies and priorities; 

• Managing varying project details including scope, resource development on tasks, risk analysis, and mitigation strategies;

• Leading the prioritization of intake and management of requests;

• Representing the technical team with project deliverables to senior leadership;

• Leading stakeholder discussions regarding ambiguous technological projects;

• Overseeing the team development and individual member progress by leveraging talent and assessing individual skills;

• Supervising improvement methodologies to enhance the efficiency of existing processes and workflows for faster deliverable timelines.

• Drove and launched multiple projects related to Customer Returns. 

• Drove waste reduction and customer experience improvement projects like Label Free Box Free customer returns at different dropoff locations like Amazon Bookstores, Whole Foods Market, Kohl’s, UPS, etc. 

• Drove projects related to Returns Transportation optimizations like optimal transportation routing for returns, consolidation for cost reduction.

AWS Marketing Engineering

Technical Program Management

• Owned Strategy, Planning, and Development for AWS site merchandising, Digital Market platform, Subsidiaries Financial data flow and automation.

• Prioritized the intake and managed the backlog of projects.

• Played the technical interface between the business, software development, BI, and data warehouse teams.

• Defined requirements, feature requests, technical specifications and influence design and architectural decisions

• Applied project management and Agile methodology skills to manage scope, plan work, coordinate resource deployment on tasks, analyze risks/develop mitigation strategies and proactively identify and resolve issues.

• Owned feature trade-offs to ship software without compromising customer experience or business relevance.

• Collaborated with multiple teams across the company, evangelizing the tech projects, building relationships and delivered organizational goals.

• Face of the technical team and deliverables to senior leadership across the company.

• Provide leadership and perspective, and drive stakeholders to decisions in ambiguous situations.

• Apply continuous improvement methodologies to analyze and understand existing processes and workflows; proactively advocate for change and implement agreed upon changes to optimize speed of delivery, solution quality and user experience.

• Defined and delivered AWS Customer transactional and marketing global email platform, which sends 100MM+ personalized emails per year in multiple languages.

• Drove strategies for AWS website personalization, recommendation, automated profile segmentation, targeting and performance improvements.

• Drove projects related to Automation of personalized marketing newsletters for millions of prospects and customers.

• Built multiple engineering teams for AWS Digital Marketing platform of size 14 from scratch.

Amazon Finance Technology

Technical Program Management

• Launched Thomson Reuters’s Serengeti billing automation which eliminated $300MM bills of manual invoicing.

• Launched Amazon Instant Video billing automation.

• Launched Subscribe with Amazon billing automation.

• Launched and streamlined external client integration for a unified experience and elimination of 75% development effort and manual invoicing.

Inbound Transportation & Vendor Shipment Management

Technical Program Management

• Oversaw program-setting and decision-making for project plans and mitigation of project risks.

• Managed the development of high-level strategic initiatives for the Inbound Transportation and Vendor shipment management Experience team.

• Supervised the coordination of new programs and relevant external parties and internal software development teams.

• Developed strategic objectives, business models, and strategies to maximize platform adoption in Amazon’s business markets.

• Led design and implementation efforts between internal teams, external merchants, and vendors to devise optimal solutions to address critical business needs.

• Oversaw the collection of business and systems requirements from internal and external consumers.

• Supervised project releases and managed production launches.

• Launched unified vendor shipment experience enabling 1-click TL/LTL shipment receives & items visibility in the warehouse.

• Launched Item prep functionality for Vendors.

• Launched Labelling solution for global vendors and marketplaces.

• Launched Vendor shipment application, shipment planning, visibility and notification systems for Mexico.

Warehouse/Fulfillment Center Launches, Amazon Fulfillment Technologies

Tech Manager (Technical Program Management, Quality Assurance, Development and Operational Excellence)

Role Responsibilities

Amazon.com is committed to being Earth’s most customer-centric company. Amazon Fulfillment Technologies deals with all the customer/vendor shipments that need to be fulfilled (delivery promise) through various warehouses across the globe. My team of size 40 owned launching new warehouses end-to-end (driving the setup of physical warehouse – legal to building setup, setting up relevant software – code changes and configuration setup for 30+ software services, virtually testing - simulation and driving physical testing), owned driving operational excellence for FC systems and handled 12X7 oncall support.

Key Accomplishments: 

• Built the Program management, Engineering and QA teams from scratch.

• Setup Oncall operations teams (FC Inbound, Outbound & Platform) to reduce operational pain for SDEs.

• Successfully launched 56 fulfillment center (warehouse) launches worldwide in 2 years (more than 100% growth in FC network) by working with 50+ teams.

• 51% of effort reduction for Program Management in 6 months. 

• Developed solutions and Automated process, execution, configuration and testing. 

• Reduced operational pain by driving root cause resolutions for multiple teams.

• Migrated FC Systems running in all the warehouses to datacenters without affecting production.

• Complete ownership on services/tools like Global safety database, Loss prevention, FC log systems, Operational health manager, , packing slip templates, FC problem SKU check website and ticketing dashboards.

• Delivered more than 70 projects (20 business critical projects).

• Owned Yearly Operational planning for Program management, QA, Development and 3 Support teams.

• Onboarded, coached and mentored 3 managers, 40+ Engineers in 1.5 years.

Warehouse Space Management, Amazon Fulfillment Technologies

Technical Program Management

Role Responsibilities

Space management software team owns configuring bins in a warehouse/fulfillment center (FC), profiling inbound ASINs (or SKUs/items) to various locations, predictive demand system to improve order processing time, recommending bins for stow, consolidating items in bins to add more usable space and FC capacity reporting with various filters like zone, unique items, usable space, available space, etc.  

As a TPM, I owned driving Space management projects like, 

• Add bay to bin hierarchy: Improvements in capacity which could reduce 1 to 2 FCs in each region, 

• Inbound destination recommendation system for Kiva (robots) FCs: Improvements in space utilization and having more storage space (optimized recommendations to create very narrow aisle truck movements and profiling items to optimize space in Kiva (robotic) area), 

• Live FC stow map: Provide visibility of available space to operations in the FC layout considering various filters which improves stow productivity. 

Key Accomplishments

• Initiated technical program management process in the team and owned it for the team.

• Have an experience of driving $100+ million savings projects

• Defined requirements, functional specifications, use cases, user experience, etc for all the projects.

• Prioritization of features, negotiate timelines with Stakeholders/Operations.

• Owned program/project and stake holder management.

• Involved and participated in technical design meetings, daily stand ups. 

• Drove Yearly Operational planning with engineering managers.

Ordering

SDET/QA Lead

Role Responsibilities

Ordering dealt mostly with shopping cart, checkout pipeline, 1-click, gifts, payments, order processing, delivery and your account modules. I was an SDET lead building test frameworks to support test automation at various levels like functional, regression, user acceptance, etc. for the mentioned modules. I also had provided QA consultancy to ordering development teams to improve the unit testing, code coverage, performance testing.

Key Accomplishments

• Built the Amazon e-commerce and order processing systems QA team.

• Owned frontend and backend test frameworks, various types of test automation. 

• Reduced 20 days testing effort to 0.5 day effort while increasing the test coverage from 30% to 100% (~7000 frontend and backend tests).

• Rearchitected test framework and automation coverage by tests segregation. Reduced ~4000 tests without impacting coverage which reduced 80% test execution time. 

• Managed and delivered Amazon country launches QA/SDET projects like Amazon Italy and Spain.

• Developed internal test frameworks and enabled engineering teams in setting up unit tests. 

• Developed tools for improving turnaround time of automation execution, reducing manual intervention in status report preparation.

• Improved the build processes for smooth transitions between development, QA and support teams during deployments.

• Early adopters of Agile methodologies in 2007. Implemented first QA scrum in Amazon, first Scrumban (best of scrum and kanban) in Amazon, which helped in self-organization, productivity and efficiency of the teams.

• Mentored five QA teams in Amazon Hyderabad.