HIMADRI SAHA

Ph: +91 – 9845241900 E-Mail: [email protected]

Creative, result-driven senior technology leader with 16 years of proven software development, design, leadership
experience; Change agent and problem solver with a passion in technology; Skilled in grasping big picture, conceptualizing,
developing and implementing solutions by partnering closely with product and business leaders including C-level executives.

CORE COMPETENCIES
Functional:
| Product Engineering | Technology Leadership | Distributed Computing | Cloud Technologies | Innovation | Devops | System
reliability | Team Building and Management | Global IT Delivery | Quality Excellence | Budgeting and Finance | Business Case
Development, Costing & Estimation |

Technology:
Programming Java, J2EE, Perl, Shell scripting
Middleware/Messaging technologies JMS, IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Web Services – SOAP/REST
Web/Application Servers Weblogic 8.1/10, Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, Springboot
Databases/Caching technologies Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache, NoSQL
Cloud technologies Amazon EC2, EBS, Elasticache
Devops Ant, Maven, Jenkins, Ansible, Bamboo
Version Control SVN, Git, Atlassian Bitbucket
Operating Systems Linux, Solaris, Windows
Design tools/methodologies J2EE design patterns, UML, Lucidchart, Microsoft Visio
Network Toolkits Akamai CDN, BigIP F5
QA Tools Selenium Webdriver, SOAP UI, JMeter, Browserstack
Project Management Agile/SCRUM methodologies, JIRA, Confluence, Sharepoint

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Head of Engineering Leading north-american B2C travel portal Sep 2016 - current
Director Engineering British Telecom (BT) Apr 2008 - Jan 2016
Technical Lead Movius Interactive Corporation Oct 2004- Mar 2008
Software Engineer Hewlett-Packard (HP) Sep 2003 – Oct 2004
Software Engineer IBM Global Services Aug 2001 – Sep 2003
EXPERIENCE SUMMARY
• Experienced technocrat with 16 yrs of IT Experience in design, development, management of scalable, distributed
web applications in eCommerce(travel) and telecom
• Extensive experience working with Java, J2EE, Open Source Technologies and frameworks, Object Oriented Analysis
and Design
• 10+ years of experience with n-tier architected systems, High availability, Clustering, Distributed systems
• 4+ years of experience with virtualized and cloud infrastructure – Private and Public(AWS)
• Driven best practices in design/deployment/testing of Agile deployments through CI/CD principles including TDD/BDD
• Expertize in driving Devops best practices – one-touch/zero-impact deployments, application, infrastructure
monitoring
• Experience with a variety of application and infrastructure build using industry standard SaaS, PaaS, IaaS models
• Delivered signature programs using Agile/SCRUM/XP programming practices
• 6+ years leading Engineering teams, QA, devops, with team sizes ranging from 30-60 FTEs and budget ranging
between $600K- $1.5m annually
• Built engineering teams from ground-up, mentoring/coaching for excellence, fostering collaboration and team work.
• Led initiatives including Technology clubs, Tech-talks, Brown bag sessions, Idea banks
• Experience working in matrixed organizations, stakeholder management- internal and external, CXO presentation
skills
Highlights Across Assignments:

Sep’16 till date: Head of Engineering (Leading north-american B2C travel portal)

Reporting to the CTO, the responsibility includes management of technology vision, providing solutions to key business
problems, alignment with marketing/sales/product management to build technology roadmap, evaluating and
implementing technology choices/architecture for future, building and leading engineering teams
Notable achivements include
• Rollout of a scalable next-gen eCommerce platform used in the OTA/travel industry. Led to ease-of use of the
revamped B2C platform, enabled better integration with third-party travel integrators, thereby an improved look-
book metrics for the business – resulting in increasing revenue potential by 15%
• Session recovery and persistence – improved customer stickiness by allowing customer to transact/book a ticket
beyond the session timeout period(2 full days). Improved customer experience, incremental revenues of ~$400K/yr.
Persistence of search metadata to help offer custom deals to customers, building analytics around search patterns
and travel trends
• Led API integration with third-party partners(travel integrators) – thereby supporting low-latency and high volume
transaction growth, resolving integration issues, improved scalability, thereby leading to leading to revenue growth
sequentially by 12%
• Bot protection – Built protection in the B2C site against harmful/unfriendly bots – content and pricing advantage
retention, shield from content theft, cost savings on GDS scans, savings on precious resources –
compute/infrastructure/bandwidth
• Zero impact deployments – Rearchitected the deployment process to enable zero impact deployments(no loss of end-
user sessions), thereby preventing ~6000 user sessions lost per deployment event– better customer experience,
allowing capability to deploy changes anytime as required
• QA Automation – Steered test-automation/CI practices through drving test-automation framework using industry-
standard automation tools – SOAP UI for API testing, Selenium webdriver for web/mobile testing. Moved from
fortnightly deployments to twice-weekly predictable deployments
• Migration of high-performance in-memory cache infrastructure from Memcache to Redis, allowing redundancy,
system reliability and improved application performance

Apr’08 – Jan’16: Director Engineering (BT)

Responsible for managing technology stack for OSS/BSS platform(s) – architecture, design and build of next-generation
technology platform, technology delivery for business growth, removing bottlenecks for the business, bottomline and
customer service improvements, and building engineering teams to support growth and achieve cost optimisation
• Next-generation platform for customer and network trouble-ticketing – built configurable workflow and
orchestration management system – which interfaced with 15+ systems in the stack including CRM/network,service
inventory/network management/workforce management systems, supported higher throughput, allowed better
customer experience, achieved improved automation backoffice through workflow tuning. This led to improved
customer service score by 0.75 and operational cost savings between 15-20% annually
Additionally led to savings on software license cost savings of £1.5m annually.
• Built Network Performance management platform to report network availability, performance and related quality
metrics e.g throughput, latency, lag. The B2B platform was used by NOC(network operations center) operators and
customers worldwide
Key challenges included – Supporting high throughput (~4m/hour) on metrics collection from remote, distributed
network elements/NMS nodes through distributed caching, batch processing and streaming, performing aggregation
and conflict resolution, deriving analytics on collected metrics to identify failure patterns(predictive analytics).
Providing real-time alerts for monitoring and reporting
• Built a Remediation Platform for assuring systems availability. The system architecture supported proactive fault
management by self-healing faults which affected application(or network) availability & performance
Functional highlights include – Remediation of application/middleware and infrastructure failures by creating a
knowledge-base of known issues(and related remediation) once failures are detected through monitoring tools.
Reused OAM modules e.g Oracle OEM, MQ for heartbeat monitoring. Self-healing supported cluster switchovers,
failover triggers and proactive health checks post recovery
• Magnetized transformation of the Network diagnostic system to an intelligent, knowledge-based diagnostic
mechanism to be used to diagnose (and localize) broadband network faults; this led to:
o Reduction in overall Call-Handling Time(CHT) from 25 mins to <10 mins thereby saving 20% operational cost for
the Broadband Wholesaler and more for Communication providers
o 15% improvement in customer service and satisfaction
o ~£10 Million yearly savings for the Broadband Wholesaler and the Communication Providers
• Improved relationship with onshore SME & cross-functional management teams and reduced turnaround time for
solution shaping, by instituting key process improvements, thereby resulting in overall growth of business
• Hiring and shaping engineering team from ground-up to accelerate engineering delivery and improve quality outcome
• Part of senior team involved in high-profile programs e.g UK Fiber rollout, IPTV launch. Involved in CEO/CIO
presentations and status updates

Oct’04 – Mar’08: Movius Interactive Corporation (Formerly IP Unity Communications), Bangalore, India
Role: Technology Lead responsible for design, development, enhancement and management of the Platform to offer
High availability, Resilience, Security, Audit, Management and Monitoring. This platform is used by integrators
and telecom companies to offer VAS to end-customers in an IMS environment

Sep’03 – Oct’04: Hewlett-Packard, Bangalore, India as Software Engineer

Aug’01 – Sep’03: IBM Global Services, Bangalore, India as Software Engineer

EDUCATION

• Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) from NIT Surathkal (formerly REC Surathkal) - 2001

PERSONAL DETAILS

Languages known: English, Hindi and Bengali