Professional Journey

18th Sept 2018 to Present - Philips

Software Competency Lead

Software Center of Excellence, I&S CoE SW Competencies, Philips India Pvt. Ltd.

What we do at Software Center of Excellence @ Philips: https://youtu.be/6QIFbqJGrks

• Manage a team of 9 global software competency experts and drive many Digital Transformation programs across geographically diverse teams in Philips.

  • .connect program impacts: Met 741 unique individuals over a period of 12 months across 25 different global cities, 44 different job role types, and 70 different departments. Partnering with individuals, teams, and business units in programs related to cultural and technical behavioral transformations through workshops and pairing sessions. One-one connects, design sessions, and other modes; 

  • .tune program impacts: Pioneered facilitating .tune discussions, where I observe other individual contributors (programmers, managers, scrum masters, and other role types), identify micro-wastes and discuss options for eliminating them. I also ran reverse-shadow sessions to enable other members to become observers and contribute to scaling this program globally. The program has reported (through survey feedback) an improvement of 28% in productivity by adopting techniques discussed during the .tune conversations.

  • .craft program impacts: Participated in a year-long conversation with different business units of Philips and helped them improve their craftsmanship score by avg. 12%. Craftsmanship score is measured via a weighted average given to practices in modules like Compiler warning, dead code, duplicate code, coding standard violations, static code analysis violations detection & elimination, unit-test, smoke-tests, functional tests practices & maturity, code reviews, Dynamic analysis, CICD practices, and maturity.

  • Conducted more than 50 hands-on workshops across topics like Unit testing, crafting code quality, new joiner environment setup, tech-debt identification and reduction, duplication code identification & elimination, new hire orientation & mentoring programs, test-driven development, mutation testing workshops, and many others. NPS: 84, Effectiveness: 4.4/5, Participant engagement: 4.51/5, Attention capture: 4.49/5, Knowledge rating: 4.62/5, Content Delivery: 4.17/5, Promptness in response: 4.88/5, Approach-ability: 5/5, Ability to resolve problems: 4.49/5, Treat participants as equals: 5/5, Encouraging participants to think in more than one way: 4.9/5, Empowering participants to take decisions: 4.93/5

  • Quality-at-desk programs: Facilitated training, built tools, and evangelized quality-at-desk, adopted by multiple businesses globally, leading to improvements in quality of unit tests (gated via mutation testing gates), improvements in quality of code reviews, improvements in quality of coding-standards and static-code-analysis practices, overall leading to healthier life-cycle management of code and build.

    • Personally influenced teams to remove 18k lines of duplicate code within three months.

• Pioneered changes in the global hiring process of Philips, making it more data-driven, analytics-friendly, and interviewee friendly, with the adoption of the process across India, Brazil, Netherlands, Israel, and China. Partnering with cross-functional teams, created reusable artifacts, facilitated multiple workshops for identified skilled interviewers, and drove alignment discussions with leadership teams to adopt these changes globally. Within the first three months of the program's launch, the selection ratio after the first tech round has reduced from 75% to 59%, but hiring manager NPS has increased by 15% over YTD. Candidate NPS has improved by 18% over YTD, HVT hiring increased by 3% over YTD post-launch, and no notable increase in time to fill (quality with speed), and the process was also featured in Harvard Business Review.

  • Actively sought out by global businesses in Philips as an interview bar-raiser to provide data-driven feedback and drive debrief sessions to conclude on hire/no-hire decisions. Also led the committee to change the process of hiring for campus interviews, devised a process to make it more data-driven, more predictable, and helped on-board identified interview panelists by conducting training programs on interviews, creating re-usable materials via role-play videos, scripts, techniques of interviews, mind-map captures, etc., which has gone live since Sept 2020, for all campus hires at Philips India Pvt. Ltd.

• IWillCode202x - As an SME, challenged myself to teach coding to non-coders, leading to a 30-session eight months journey of the "IWillCode202x" program. IWillCode202x GitHub Repository is the testimony for completing the challenge, and here are some key highlights: 16k lines of code added via 269 commits, nine pull requests, 662 lines removed by running de-duplication exercises and static code analysis exercises, 40.5% increase in confidence of BEQR team members, to look at code comfortably and derive meaning out of it.

• Contributed to Philips' open-source code base via Cerberus (Philips' static code analysis tool), Text Similarity Processor, and code-reviewed some other open-source code bases like Python guardrails. 

• Actively contributed towards on-boarding new joiners, and influencing them through workshops & programming exercises, the importance of writing requirements from a customer point of view (BDD style development), and enforcing graceful practices, at the IDE, at the developer desk, and the build machines. 

• Mentored juniors and reverse-mentored senior executives globally to help gain knowledge about DevOps practices and coach towards cultural transformation within the team by adopting practices customized to his teams.

• Conducted multiple pair-programming exercises with multiple businesses, led "design thinking" discussions, influenced learning & development programs, all focused towards cultural transformation, addressing the following areas: What do we want, how are we going to measure them, are we measuring them, what will do if we are nearing the threshold, how do we react when we have breached the threshold, how do we proactively react, instead react after an incident.

• Participated as a speaker (program behavior metrics) and a panelist, at the Bengaluru Software Excellence Conference 2019, by conducting a hands-on workshop, discussion session, and panel discussion:https://twitter.com/madanneelapu/status/1171759595657654273 

15th Feb 2015 to 31st Aug 2018 - Amazon

Software Development Engineer II

Amazon Development Center India Private Limited

As a Software Development Engineer II at Amazon, I was accountable & responsible for building microservices, API’s, tools and platforms at the Amazon Retail Catalog Services and the Transaction Risk Management Systems organisations. My day-to-day responsibilities included disambiguating problems by defining structured use-cases, design it for scale, performance and re-usability (HLD & LLD), code, write appropriate test-cases (unit & integration), deploy, maintain code, mentor juniors, imbibe best practices in tech & non-tech work. In this endeavor, my contributions included:

• Implemented rules & config driven API to add friction to a purchase with inventory-block-abuse pattern.

• Designed generic context container for fraud-check-services, which is now used by 9 external clients to onboard to our fraud-check platform.

• Implemented a micro service to check for uniqueness in account creation for AmazonPay, supporting 1130 TPS in production.

• Modified an open-source JSON parser (JsonLib) to handle the inconsistent xml to json parsing & improved our catalog indexing by 20%.

• Optimized software by running performance benchmark tools & identified hardware glitches and mitigated them, to save $34000 in 2017.

• Facilitated >5 day-long workshops on Scrum & Agile Product Ownership, to 150+ participants, with an avg. presenter rating of 4.27 out of 5.

• Customized the scrum process for my team & bringing our task completion rate to 85% from 63%.

• Winner of Amazon’s ASCS Hackathon 2016. 45 working prototypes, 30+ teams, 4 countries, judged by principal engineers & senior managers.

• Authored & owned multiple processes including the On-boarding of a new team member, on-call guide, troubleshooting pages, bookmarks.

• Wrote a reporting tool to optimize comparisons & reduce SDE & ML scientists effort by 60%, a tool to automate the manual opening of SLA missed workflows for manual investigation, a tool to automatically ingest ASIN data daily (over 2 Billion), by createDate and category into our analytics systems to drive analytics reports.

• Proactive in mitigating risk and setting up projects for success, multiple times, recognized by the org via TRMS ZEUS Award in Oct 2017.

• Instrumental in identifying and customising processes, adopted across different teams in Amazon, recognized via TRMS SPOT Award in Nov 2017.

• Facilitator for Scrum Workshops & Agile Product Ownership Workshops, with 5, day-long sessions, 150+ participants, avg. presenter rating at 4.27 out of 5.

• Creator and owner of multiple referred assets like: Onboarding Guide, OnCall Guide, Troubleshooting page, Coding standards, Bookmarks etc.

• Tech-promotion calibrator at Amazon, having calibrated 3 promotions from SDE-1 to SDE-2, and all of them lead to positive conversions.

• Passionate about interviews, have created an interview guideline document & calibrated questions for my org. 71 interviews, conversion rate of 30%.

1st April 2013 to 26th Nov 2015 - Exeter

Senior Lead - Software Development

Exeter Software India Private Limited, a fully owned subsidiary of Exeter Group

As a Senior Lead - Software Development at ESI, I was accountable & responsible for several critical functions of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act implementation. I was directly responsible for designing, coding & executing these functionalities, troubleshooting technical challenges, resolving customer pain points, providing outstanding user-experience & converting hurdles into product/feature opportunities, improve & maintain engineering deliverables (code & non-code artefacts), cross team communications & coordination. In this endeavor, my contributions included:

10th July 2007 to 31st March 2013 - IBM

Staff Software Engineer

IBM India Software Labs Private Limited

As a Staff software engineer @IBM-ISL, I worked on Java APIs for XML based Web Services (JAXWS) & enabling it on an internal framework called Light Weight Infrastructure, wrote eclipse-based plug-in code for IBM’s Lotus Expeditor Toolkit & Webcontainer popularizing the test driven development approach, wrote adapters for integrating Lotus Sametime with Lotus Expeditor & wrote solutions integrating IBM products to support Natural Resources Industry scenarios for understanding & mapping key mining areas & its equipments.