I build data-driven engineering cultures and the teams behind them, from 0-to-1 products to platforms serving millions of users. Currently leading engineering at Headout, and mentoring engineers and managers 1:1 on leadership and data strategy.
What makes me qualified:
- Led engineering teams at Headout, Apollo.io, HackerRank and Postman, delivering major product initiatives with cross-team coordination
- Grew a 10 members remote data engineering team from 5 office based people, and scaled it to handle 10s of TeraBytes of data and integrate 100+ data sources
- Built “Data transformation platform” and “Data integration platform” with the aim of data democratisation, improving the experience for 17+ million users on the Postman API Platform and Apollo.io Data products
- Improved company DevEx score from -24 to 53 at Headout, and cut bounce rate by 50%+ for Apollo.io customers
CONTACT
| Email sumit0krk@gmail.com |
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|---|---|---|
| Blog databirdie.substack.com |
Mentoring topmate.io/sumit0k, mentoring-club.com |
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/sumit0k |
TECHNICAL SKILLS
| DATA STORES | Amazon Redshift, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Cassandra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Aerospike |
| LANGUAGES/LIB. | Python, Javascript, SQL, Node.JS, Express.JS, React JS, Angular JS, Shell Script, Java |
| TOOLS | DBT, Apache Kafka, Spark, Airflow, Docker, Kibana, Logstash, LLMs, LlamaHub, NGINX, Git |
| CLOUDS/SAAS | AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Linode, Heroku, Postman, Apollo.IO, JIRA |
EXPERIENCE
Headout August 2025 - Present
SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER August 2025 - Present
- Delivered five major product initiatives across the company, each involving multi-engineer cross-repo coordination
- Improved company DevEx score from -24 to 53 and drove a build stability initiative that reduced production bugs
- Launched a structured internal mentorship program pairing senior and junior engineers across pods for technical depth and cross-team knowledge transfer
- Led AI adoption across pods, from initiating the internal AI product and driving the vector DB architecture decision for search, to enabling engineers to use AI on large migrations
Stealth Startup November 2024 - July 2025 (9 months)
INDEPENDENT PRODUCT STRATEGIST & TECHNICAL LEADER November 2024 - July 2025 (9 months)
- Launched 4 micro ventures in domains such as digital products shop, blogging platform, Print on demand and physical book
- Applied engineering leadership principles on technical execution, releasing products with SSO login, payments and referral programs
- Iteratively researched market opportunities, validated business strategies, and explored monetization models with user feedback
Apollo.io August 2023 - October 2024 (1 year 3 months)
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER August 2023 - October 2024 (1 year 3 months)
- Launched 4 major products, two of them led by our team and other two in partnership with different product teams and AI/LLM assisted
- Cut bounce rate by 50%+ for our customers by gathering signals from all users of the engagement platform and identifying bad emails
- Automated asks from sales and customer success teams which reduced turnaround time from 2 weeks to 5 minutes for such requests
HackerRank May 2022 - July 2023 (1 year 3 months)
SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER May 2022 - July 2023 (1 year 3 months)
- Introduced systematic customer support process which reduced average ticket resolution time by 20x to help Customer success team achieve better SLOs and increased accountability of teams
- Introduced a new system for launching environments and removed manual processes resulting in single week delivery from multi quarters
- Introduced Hubs, Spokes & Pods model to handle visionary and missionary goals in parent team resulting in faster focused execution from multi quarters to multi sprints
- Led the effort to migrate infrastructure to new efficient system resulting in around 75% cost savings and increased reliability
Postman July 2018 - May 2022 (3 years 11 months)
ENGINEERING MANAGER August 2020 - May 2022 (1 year 10 months)
- Mentored and grew 10 members remote team from 5 office based people by remotely hiring and smoothening out processes of onboarding, on-call, contribution and collaboration
- Scaled data engineering team to handle 10s of TeraBytes of data from 100s of GigaBytes by designing isolated interfaces in storage and compute
- Scaled data ingestion upto 10 billion rows/month from 10s of millions by bringing in 100+ integrations from different sources and launching Data Integration platform
- Improved experience of 17M users of Postman API Platform via Search and Enterprise Reporting by building systems for data sourcing from data warehouse https://bit.ly/postman-search
TECHNICAL LEAD July 2019 - July 2020 (1 year 1 month)
- Directly impacted 10+ teams and made company more data centric by launching Data transformation platform and pushing for Data democratisation along with Data Analysis team https://bit.ly/postman-datademocratization
- Reducing storage cost by 2x in Redshift by implementing compression strategies in tables
- Designed multiple resilient and auditable systems to import and export data from and to different sources
- Increased queries speed by 6x and reduced data wait time by optimising Redshift storage distribution
DATA ENGINEER July 2018 - June 2019 (1 year)
- Onboarded and coordinating with new team members and other members of different squads
- Increased quality and confidence on the data to a level where it was used to serve consumers by actively tracking, monitoring and proactively resolving incidents
- Brought principle of Software engineering in data analytics with the help of Data Build Tool (DBT)
- Contributed to and integrated multiple open source projects
MineWhat, Inc May 2015 - June 2018 (3 years 2 months)
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER February 2017 - June 2018 (1 year 5 months)
- Product level Module Development for Internal Product releases
- Lead Data team of company and provided Back-end support for the process, coordinating team members based on requirements
SOFTWARE ENGINEER II February 2016 - January 2017 (1 year)
- Cloud Platform deployment (Azure and AWS)
- Designed a complete Stream architecture based Analytics Solution using Elastic stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash)
- Designed a User Enrichment flow for our customers and integrated with 4 major email solutions
- Handled our small team of 8 members with senior team member, whenever the need occurred
SOFTWARE ENGINEER August 2015 - January 2016 (6 months)
- Managing NoSQL Databases (MongoDB, Cassandra) for Analytics and Customer Inventory Data Storage
- Integrated with e-Commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce for smoother customer onboarding and automating data collection
SOFTWARE ENGINEER INTERNSHIP May 2015 - July 2015 (3 months)
- Website Crawling
- Python Scripts for 3rd party tools Integration
- Data extraction and processing
EDUCATION & AWARDS
Certified Mentor Dec 2022 - Present
- 15+ sessions with 10+ mentees (Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Software Engineers) from multiple countries https://bit.ly/sumit-mentor
B. Tech. in Computer Science & Engg. Bilaspur, CG
GURU GHASIDAS UNIVERSITY, CGPA: 9.0/10.0 August 2011 - April 2015
- PROJECT: PinQuip Messenger (Node.js, JavaScript, WebRTC, Node Webkit)
- Real-time messaging and communication platform implemented via Sockets
- With support for File Sharing, Audio & Video call
Training in Network Management Kharagpur, WB
IIT-KGP + NETTECH PVT. LTD., 4TH POSITION OUT OF 115 STUDENTS May 2014 - June 2014
- PROJECT: NETMIN - Server Administrator (Shell Scripting, LAMP stack)
- Can manage complex Server management with a fluid web interface
Articles
- Behind the Code: Modern Engineering
- Career Journey: Sumit (Data Birdie)
- Why we chose Apache Spark for ETL (Extract-Transform-Load)
- Optimising Elasticsearch storage space by 60x — Know Your Data (KYD)
- Optimising MongoDB Storage — Know Your Data (KYD)
- Optimising E-Commerce Data — Know Your Data (KYD)
- Know Your Data (KYD)