Suman Karthik
[email protected] +00-0000000000
Profile

I'm a builder at heart. I've gone from building systems and platforms, to building highly effective Engineering organizations and Technology. I've always seeked out and worked at an eclectic mix of organizations during critical periods of rapid transformation and hypergrowth where I've designed, architected and built flexible and resilient Technology, functions and orgs to survive and thrive beyond their transformative origins and constraints. Living through technology and orgs breaking down at the seams due to their symbiotic dysfunctions under these adverse conditions has afforded me a singular perspective on what it takes to build, shape and nurture highly effective Technology and Engineering organizations and how to evolve and guide them through a minefield of missteps, dead ends and pathological failure modes to serve the org's evolving needs.

As a Senior IC I'm known for delivering consistent high quality outcomes and impact by being hands on, mentoring Sr ICs and EMs, creating and nurturing an engineering culture of excellence. I'm equally at ease partnering and working with C-Suite executives and stakeholders as I am working within the engineering org.


Work
Technology
Thought leadership, Large complex Strategic Problem/Area Definition and Evangelization. Synthesizing, Designing, architecting, building and stewarding a Technology ecosystem of platforms, functions, tooling and processes.
Org Building
Creating and nurturing a high ownership environment, Expectation setting, Mentoring, Hiring, Cultural Stewardship, Organizational and technological transformation through consensus building.
Execution & Impact
Deeply understand business objectives, Define Products, Platforms, Key Metrics, Roadmaps with business and operational stakeholders. Execution, Stakeholder and Delivery management to deliver strategic and tactical business impact

Recently
Uber
Senior Staff Engineer
Jan 2020 - March 2023

I joined uber at the beginning of 2020 as a senior staff engineer mandated to chart a course for the platformization of payments compliance function within uber.

Payments Compliance: Payments is one of the most regulated industries across the world. Uber's global footprint and varied service modalities and customer personas demanded adherence to a variety of regulatory compliance norms in all our markets. When I joined uber, the payments compliance team was primarily delivering on compliance programs for different markets. It was quite apparent that a pure program delivery model for payments compliance was untenable at scale, especially if we wanted to be cost effective, deliver seamless customer experience, decrease time to market and be responsive to regulatory changes in different markets. After deep diving into the domain with stakeholders and understanding the unique challenges of payments compliance for an Organization like Uber, I synthesized the vision for OCP(One compliance platform) from first principles. Designing, architecting, evangelizing and reshaping our programs teams into platform, capabilities and functions teams for delivering on OCP were my primary contributions in my first year at uber.

Since then I've enabled the growth of Payments compliance org and it's technology from strength to strength by Driving the technology mandate for Payments Compliance and stewarding Payments India. Helping Senior ICs grow through Mentorship, guidance and creating appropriate space/opportunities. Scaling up the payments compliance tech org and ecosystem while driving adoption and impact. Establishing an impact oriented culture of delivery, engineering and operational excellence.


Previously
Udaan
Engineering
Jan 2017 - Dec 2019

I joined udaan 6 months after it's inception. I owned Customer Feed and Buyer Network products at udaan in the beginning but My most impactful contribution at udaan was the Creation and rapid growth of our Fulfillment Center/Warehousing function and product.

Warehousing: In the early part of 2018 Our Intracity Food Business was moving from strength to strength and was seriously taxing our intracity supply chain logistics from a sheer capacity perspective. It was clear we would not be able to scale with our existing supply chain paradigm in intracity for more than a couple of months at most. From this emerged a tactical need to immediately move to a Warehousing centered supply chain paradigm. Beyond the immediate need we were certain that fulfillment centers and udaan managed fulfillment would play a vital strategic role in our evolving supply chain and fulfillment story. With this in mind I got to work building our Warehousing system from scratch and started our first warehouse by the end of the quarter. From these humble beginnings I grew it to more than a 100 fulfillment centers across India for categories as varied as Staples, FMCG, Fresh Vegetables, Pharma, Home & Kitchen, Mobiles, Stationary, Clothing & Lifestyle. With Fulfillment Centers as a core construct we have been able to build open and closed box supply chains for our intracity and intercity category needs with an O2D ranging from a few hours to a few days. This rapid growth in variety, scale and reach of our managed fulfillment offering would not have been possible without a fulfillment center product and technology that provided the required flexibility in constructs across archetypes while also delivering on the core needs of each archetype. Today the warehousing technology I built continues to drive operations of more than 200 warehouses across India forming the heart of our national supply chain serving more than 900 cities and more than 12000 pin codes across varied categories.


Flipkart
Technical Architect
April 2012 - Dec 2016

I was part of the tech-infra team tasked with building Software Defined Infra and Services in our new DC. I used to own and drive the tech mandate for the End-to-End experience team. I've designed, built and owned multiple platforms and systems that are widely used at Flipkart to deliver critical functionality. Some of them include...

IaaS Compute: I've owned and was responsible for Flipkart's Elastic Compute Platform. This along with our ELB are fundamental IaaS primitives on top of which All our PaaS components and customer applications are deployed. My latest work has centered around compute platform resource management and orchestration aimed at improving utilization through better fitment, resource utilization to enable flexibility and decrease costs while delivering predictable compute resources for peak scenarios like Big Billion Days.

Scotty: Deployment and change management service that enables an immutable infra paradigm in the cloud. It coordinates and governs infra and release assets to achieve, correct, predictable, well controlled deployments and change management on SDI(Software Defined Infra). It is designed to do it's job without communicating with atomic units of infra which makes it trivially scalable and able to handle change management for 100s of thousands of infra assets, simultaneously.

Repo-svc: A generic post build release service that's used to publish and consume binary release assets in a well defined manner. Release artifacts are published into versioned repos which can further be used to compose versioned environments which make up the Universe of released assets for associated deployments. The design of repo-svc allows for repeatable and predictable deployments by enforcing well defined immutable environments comprised of release assets.

Lego: Lego is a highly performant, highly scalable (in terms of traffic and developers) and resilient application framework. It is an incredibly flexible framework that is used by multiple teams at Flipkart and is deployed in different shapes on over a thousand bare-metal servers. These installations are combinedly capable of handling upto 2 billion requests per hour. This is one of the critical systems that make the festive season and events like Big Billion Day possible at an unprecedented scale.

Igor: Is a platform to curate upto a 100,000 online stores comprised of millions of products while processing billions of product updates. It delivers low latency entity processing with tremendous visibility and fine grained control over the data processing pipeline. It provides strict processing and fairness guarantees in a multi-tenant setting while minimizing operational overhead. All of Flipkart's stores are managed by this platform.


Past
IBM, India Research Lab
Tech Hire
June 2010 - April 2012

Drove gamification and Social Network Analysis research and solutions in the lab. Developed a service delivery automation solution. Co-authored an FP7 joint proposal for smarter government initiative involving social networks. Authored multiple patents and publications

Spinaxys
Co-Founder
April 2006 - Dec 2009

Co-founded Spinaxys with two friends after taking a sabbatical from IIIT Hyderabad. We provided high IP services to organizations for our cash flow and built products on the side. I was responsible for product conceptualization, design and development. Our products included a collaborative filtering service for pushing relevant sms content, world's first open-source digital signage and blue-casting system and an enterprise knowledge management solution.

S-axxis
Interim CTO
June 2007 - Dec 2007

I setup the company's technical team and operations. Built the tech and QA teams, setup development, build and test infrastructure, implemented an auditable project management process system for the Dev and QA team. I acted as the technical architect and presales solution architect. We reached profitability in 6 months with a 4 fold increase in the number of employees.


Education
IIIT, Hyderabad
MS by Research
June 2004 - Dec 2010

Published four papers in top tier computer vision conferences and a dissertation; Mentored and guided students at the lab. My research was centered on Content Based Image Retrieval with focus on building highly scalable CBIR systems. My main contributions to the field are part of my dissertation 'Efficient Image Retrieval Methods For Large Scale Dynamic Image Databases'. I was Involved in organizing an international computer vision conference (ACCV 2006).


Publications

Suman Karthik, Efficient Image Retrieval Methods For Large Scale Dynamic Image Databases, Dissertation, MS by Research, CVIT IIIT Hyderabad, September 2010

Chandrika Pulla, Suman Karthik and C.V. Jawahar Efficient Semantic Indexing for Image Retrieval Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'10),23-26 Aug. 2010, Istanbul, Turkey.

Suman Karthik, C.V. Jawahar, Incremental On-line semantic Indexing for Image Re- trieval in Dynamic. Databases 4th International Workshop on Semantic Learning and Applications, CVPR, 2008, Florida

Suman Karthik, C.V. Jawahar, Analysis of Relevance Feedback in Content Based Image Retrieval, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Control, Au- tomation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), 2006, Singapore.

Suman Karthik, C.V. Jawahar, Virtual Textual Representation for Efficient Image Retrieval. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Visual Information Engineering(VIE), 26-28 September 2006 in Bangalore, India.

Suman Karthik, C.V. Jawahar, Efficient Region Based Indexing and Retrieval for Images with Elastic Bucket Tries, Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition(ICPR), 2006

Suman K Pathapati, Subhashini Venugopalan, Ashok Pon Kumar, Anuradha Bhamidipaty People and Entity Retrieval in Implicit Social Networks. 2011 IEEE 5th International Conference on Internet Multimedia Systems Architecture and Application


Patents

Targeted Maintenance of Computing Devices in Information Technology Infrastructure United States US8818945B2

Recommending server management actions for information processing systems United States US9667473B2

System And Method For On-Demand Simulation Based Learning For Automation Framework United States US20140067360A1