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When I joined my new team , I took lead on a new project which was complex in nature, had many unknowns and our team had to work on new framework, techstack, data models. The team was following agile methodology and will start with the work in first sprint. there was no concept of zero sprint or story grooming prior to the start of first sprint.

with the existing approach I envisioned some issues:

1. Because the number of unknown were high, the chances of doing wrong estimations for development were high.

2. There were high chances that the prioritisation is not right and we might have to revisit the features again and again.

3.  We might find out about unknowns while we are in the development process and that might cause delays.

To overcome these issues, I suggested some changes in our approach:

1. Increase the planning for one more release cycle and group the features as now, next and later.

2. For the features planned in the now group , prioritise them for the next release and complete the research and PRDs for them one sprint early. That means dev and QA will have 2 weeks extra to go through the stories, find out the dependencies and share the feedback. This helped in identifying if we need POCs for any feature or we can right away start developing them. Or if further modularisation is required.

3. I suggested to track the features related to new project in a different group, because to begin with the pace of the delivery will be slow.

When we begin, we took one complete release only in the RnD and understanding the new framework and doing small POCs to validate our understanding.

From second release, when we as a team were ready with good understanding on the expectations and other tech dependencies we started delivering and we could complete 2 full flows from end to end.

We had very less amount of spillover and could complete almost everything in the backlog, which was a big issue in earlier releases.

As a QA leader I had to choose between run a full check of a new functionality that wasnt very popular or use or let the change pass over with the aprove of the PM for some time saving. I choose run the full check, take a few days more, but when the functionality goes to production it works well, without any bugs.

I see myself working at the intersection of engineering and quantitative finance ideally at a hedge fund such as Two Sigma. My past experiences at Harvard Medical School and internships at MITRE/rapStudy have given me an interest in creating scalable systems that are high performant and capable of ingesting large amounts of data for model development and research.  I strongly believe Two Sigma is the perfect place for me to work on these highly technical projects. Additionally, I also look forward to the prospect of entering leadership roles during my career, where I can play a more impactful role in prioritizing cultivation of engineering talent and projects in fields such as low-latency and data engineering.

In the Meraki integration project, the supply chain process required significant optimization of the entire flow. To achieve this, most of the shipping-related process needed to be modified. However, the team lacked sufficient time to complete the work because the planned use of an adapter did not work, requiring me to redesign the flow.

With limited time remaining before system integration testing (SIT), the cross-functional teams and other tracks were ready to test their code, and management was unwilling to postpone SIT and Cycle 1 testing. Since there was an additional round of SIT and Cycle 2 testing planned, I decided to proceed with the changes that the team had already completed. We migrated the completed code to the test instance and communicated that only Phase 1 of the changes would be released initially, while the remaining changes would be delivered during Cycle 2 testing.

I ensured the Phase 1 delivery was designed to avoid impacting the end-to-end flow, allowing the other teams to proceed with testing their portions of the code. This approach ensured that other teams' deadlines were not affected. I also informed the cross-functional teams that the OTM and GTM changes were completed, and the remaining shipping-related code optimization would be delivered before Cycle 2 testing, along with the next round of SIT.

By taking this approach, I ensured that complete testing was not impacted and that the project stayed on track.

I believe my biggest achievement is building a high performing team amongst a lot of chaos. I started as an engineering manager for replenishment team, soon due to restructuring I was asked to lead a different BU called Parcel and I was given the team from scratch, 8 months into this I heard the leadership is deciding to put Parcel on KTLO and give me a new tier 1 service called channels. This service was highly unstable with a lot of issues and tech debt. This service was transitioned among 4 engg manager in past three years (4th me). 

TASK

My job was to do a successful transition of this service and keep the team motivated

Actions

- When I got to. know about Parcel KTLO and having a new product under me, I wanted to ensure this is communicated to the team clearly with empathy and I wanted to ensure the team that this will only benefit their growth

- I started with a team meeting, shared a couple of wins that we did in parcel, shared even though we did so much, Parcel is being put on KTLO for various xyz reasons.

- I told them every crisis situation is an opportunity and by channels coming under us, we can showcase that even the toughest of the services can be maintained if the tech debt is continuously addressed

- Post team meeting I kept 1:1 with every member and listened them, helped answer their questions

- A couple of team members did share that they felt proud about what they developed in Parcel and were feeling sad that it was going in KTLO.

- I shared that products coming in KTLO happens sometime and this in no way reflects the teams performance, infact our teams reputation is very good amongst the leaders thats why they have given us the most important service (which is also in the worst shape)

- Under previous engg managers there was minimal to no improvement in the service on tech and product side because they were busy fixing on call issues

- I worked with the team to fix this by assigning ywo people to on call and rest two on fixing the issues from root cause. 

- In a couple of months this gave us brwating space since the oncall issues reduced directly impacting reduction in customer queries

- We got appreciated by leadership for this

Result

- Team members were highly motivated

- Learnt a lot

- Got appreciated by leadership for this hard works

l, I initially built automation scripts for trade reconciliations and reporting using standalone Python and UNIX-based cron jobs. These worked well for smaller data volumes, but as our operations scaled across global teams in London, Hong Kong, and the Bahamas, performance and maintainability became a bottleneck.

I realized I needed to adapt my workflow to better support large-scale, distributed processes. So, I changed how I worked by migrating critical pipelines from PostgreSQL and flat scripts into a more robust ETL framework using Databricks and Delta Lake. I restructured batch processes into streaming jobs and modularized the Python code to be production-grade. I also started using Kafka and Kubernetes to improve system reliability and orchestration.