Hands-on Technology Leader

with 19+ years experience

Thanks for visiting my website. I am a software professional with extensive experience in leading tech initiatives and teams related to web, mobile and big-data applications for industry leading companies. Feel free to explore my website and social profiles to know more about me.

MY BLOG RESUME

I feel fortunate to get opportunities throughout my career to work in different domains of the software industry, ranging from kernel development in my initial years of career to semiconductor design to technical pre-sales to scalable web / hybrid apps and then to big-data processing space. I strongly believe this diverse experience gives me an ability to look at problems in hand from different perspectives and helps me be a better technology leader and decision maker.

Gaurav Dhiman

Technology Leader

Experience Snapshot

Snapshot of what percent of my total experience I worked in different domains and technologies.

66%

Technology Leadership

50%

Web & Cross Platform Mobile Apps

26%

Big Data Apps

20%

Technical Presales

22%

Kernel Development

Key Skills

1

Technical skills

- Understanding of broader technology landscape across Web, Mobile, Cloud, IoT, Big-Data and ML space.
- Practioner of software development best practices like Agile & iterative dev cycles, BDD, TDD, Code-Reviews (PRs), Automated CI/CD pipeline.
- Building solutions using event-driven microservices and cloud native architectures that are scalable using Docker and Kubernetes.
- Extensive experience with big data ETL and analytics applications based on PySpark and Hadoop technologies.
- Extensive experience with development and delivery of full-stack web and cross platform mobile applications.
- Hands-on with development technologies like Python, SQL/NoSQL DBs, PySpark, Pandas Hadoop, Hive, Kafka, NodeJS, ReactJS, Redux, C/C++, Linux/Unix.
- Hands on with testing frameworks like MochaJS, ChaiJS, SinonJS, Cypress, Behave (Cucumber), Pytest.
- Well versed with tools like Git, JIRA, NPM, PIP, Jenkins, Containers (Dockers), Kubernetes.
- Knowledge of Machine Learning (ML) landscape; Deep neural networks, Convolutional neural networks, Recurrent Neural networks, Re-enforcement learning, Keras, TesorFlow.

2

Leadership skills

- Keeping up to date with latest technology trends and innovations.
- Leading initiatives for technology transformation - from old tech stack to latest tech stacks.
- Capturing business problems and leading teams to build and deliver customer focused technology solutions for the same.
- Aligning teams on technical achitecture across enterprise or business units to achieve larger business objectives.
- Managing, guiding and mentoring team members to achieve their long-term as well as short-term career goals.

Professional Experience

Jan 2021 - till now

Senior Architect

@ PennyMac Loan Services
- Leading Analytics & Reporting team for loan processing system. Directing team towards adoption of big-data analytics.
- Driving effort towards transition of batch reports from DB stored procedures to Spark based processes, to off-load the DB workload and improve DB performance.
- Led and delivered an initiative to transition a batch loan processing pipeline report to real-time incremental Pandas based report, processing around 0.5 million events per hour using AWS lambdas.
- Hiring, mentoring and building teams of software engineers, software architects & managers to fulfill the resource needs.

Jul 2014 - Jan 2021

Senior Engineering Manager / Senior Architect

@ Cognizant Technology Solutions (working with American Express)
- Technically lead teams to build customer facing web apps and big-data ETL pipelines in the Marketing group of American Expess. Portfolio's objective is to re-enage customer by sending relevant and personalized marketing emails to customers at right time.
- Customer facing web applications are built using technologies like NodeJS, NextJS, ReactJS, Redux and MongoDB.
- Backend big-data processing ETL pipeline is built using HIVE, Python, Spark (PySpark) and HBase technologies. This ETL pipeline is responsible for processing more than 100 million customer records per month for delivery of marketing emails to customers.
- Contribute to code development, pull requests (PR) reviews and unit as well as end-to-end cucumber tests.
- Motivate, mentor and drive the team members to achieve their respective delivery goals.
- Continuously review the development processes to ensure best practices are followed across teams for development, code reviews, testing and release cycles.
- Working with the product management teams to refine, align and implement the product roadmaps for these applications.
- Prepare the mid and long term architectural vision and align other teams in the email marketing ecosystem to achieve it.
- Participate in hiring process to build right team of engineers and senior engineers for Cognizant.

Oct 2012 - Jun 2014

Co-Founder & Entreprenuer

@ S3 TechZulla Pvt. Ltd.
- Started an entrepreneurial venture to build SaaS based e-commerce and travel solutions for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Built a team from scratch and led it to develop three online software products - RetailEMall.com, DesignStudio and TravelCRM. Scaled up operations to around 80 customers. Media coverage on: YourStory.com, NextBigWhat.com
- RetailEMall was a cloud based SaaS solution for small and mid sized retailers to set up online stores in a few clicks. Reference link: RetailEMall.com
- DesignStudio was a web solution to build online stores for selling apparel with customized designs. Reference link: DesignStudio
- TravelCRM was a web based solution originally developed for Travelopod.com and was later customized to sell to few other online travel agencies (OTAs). Reference link: TravelCRM

Aug 2011 - Aug 2012

Technical Architect

@ Infosys Ltd.
Worked as a Technical Architect for Capital Groups Companies (CGC) in the Cloud division of Infosys. I led design and architectural initiatives to move legacy applications from on-prem to hybrid cloud environment. Interviewed, hired and built the team from 2 engineers to 15 engineers for this initiative at India office.

Oct 2008 - Jul 2012

Technical Presales Manager

@ NEC HCL System Technologies Ltd. (now NEC India)
Started product presales unit for NEC Technologies from scratch. Grew a team from one solution engineer to 24 members. Managed the team to support NEC’s enterprise software sales team in India, Asia Pacific, Europe and US. My key responsibilities were:

- Growing and managing a team of solution engineers in South East Asia for NEC’s Enterprise Software Group (ESG).
- Representing NEC and delivering tech-talks at trade shows, industry events & marketing events.
- Enabling onsite sales teams across Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America with product trainings and marketing material. - Proposing Business Continuity & IT Infra solutions to customers / global partners based on NEC IT Infrastructure software products like NEC’ ExpressCluster (DR & BC solution) and Virtual PC Center (Think client computing solution) and Sphericall (Unified communication) suite of products along with virtualization software like VMware, Hyper-V, KVM etc. Used to closely work with software sales groups in NEC subsidiaries across the world.
- Providing market / customer feedback (feature improvements, new feature requests) to product teams in NEC Japan and ensuring high priority items get included in product roadmap.

Oct 2006 - Mar 2008

Technical Lead

@ NEC HCL System Technologies Ltd. (now NEC India)
Worked along with NEC’s core Linux kernel team in Japan to port OpenSolaris kernel on ARM platform for the infosystem that was planned to be installed in Toyota cars. Led a small team of three kernel engineers and one Japanese interpreter. Technologies used: C language, Assembly lnguage.

Sept 2002 - Oct 2006

Software Engineer

@ Cadence Design Systems
Worked as an engineer in product development team for Cadence’s RTL compiler (logic synthesis) product. Cadence is the second largest EDA company in the world. Technologies used: C/C++, Linux, GDB.

@ Computer Associates (now part of Broadcom)
Worked as engineer for development of IAM (Identity and Access Management) suite of products. Technologies used: C/C++, Linux.

@ HCL Technologies Ltd.
Worked as an engineer on NCR Corporation’s project for ATM management software (Gasper). Technologies used: VBA, VB Script

Education

Master of Computer Applications (MCA)

1999 - 2002

Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

Bachelor Of Commerce (B.Com)

1995 - 1998

Kurukshetra University

Personal Projects & Blogs

In my interest to keep myself abreast with new in technology, I try to build something quick and dirty.
These are some sample apps that I built in my free time, just to have a feel of technology.

Description	Hosted Link	Codebase
Built a real time discussion forum, a Progressive Web App (PWA) that makes the online forums much fun to use. This app is built from scratch using MaterialUI (ReactJS), Redux, Redux-ORM, FeathersJS (Web-services) and NextJS (SSR).	https://discussion-im.herokuapp.com	https://bitbucket.org/gaurav-dhiman/discussion_im/src/master/
A mobile app to push nearby offers to users, based on the user's interest and location. Users can set up the kind of offers they are interested in an app and then the app sends push notifications whenever the offer of given interest is published in a specific range of user’s location (geo-fencing). App is built using Expo (React Native) and MeteorJS.	-NA-	https://bitbucket.org/gaurav-dhiman/push-notify-react-native-app/src/master/
Sample project to demonstrate how to integrate AugularJS with SailsJS and OrientDB to build web app from scratch.	-NA-	https://github.com/gauravdhiman/sailsjs-angularjs-orientdb-poc
ORM Adaptor / library written to connect SailsJS (NodeJS framework) with OrientDB (Graph based DB). Made it open-source on NPM too.	https://www.npmjs.com/package/sails-orientdb-binary	https://github.com/gauravdhiman/sails-orientdb-binary
My blog about Linux Kernel Internals that I used to maintain long back when I was working in Linux Kernel space.	http://lkdp.blogspot.com/	-NA-