Gokul N K

☎ : +91-9739991159
✉ : nkgokul@gmail.com

Summary

With over 15 years experience in engineering, product development, data, delivery and people management I am an experienced technology leader with an acumen in business and problem solving.

I have successfully built teams from scratch, worked with vendors, stake holders across the world and different teams within the organisations in creating roadmaps which were critical to the organisation goals. As a leader I believe in building teams that are based on trust and nurturing the individuals in the team to deliver the value for the end customer.

Work Experience

Interesting roles and projects listed in reverse chronological order.

Engineering Manager at Blinkit - Oct 2019 to Oct 2022

Started with building a new team for CRM from scratch and headed the practice as Engineering Manager. Went on to head the catalog management which was a critical part in product onboarding and store onboarding for the E-commerce Business at Blinkit and was the upstream service for all other downstream services in Blinkit. Later on built the service for org level visibility and orchestration of the product/store onboarding flows as they involved various services across demand and supply teams in addition to the operations team.

Product and Store Onboarding Flows - May 2021 to October 2022

• Built lighthouse which was used across the org for debugging across different services and hence reducing the TAT for fixing any P0 customer facing issues. Helped bring in the lifecycle visibility from end to end for the whole org including engineering teams and operations teams.
• Built orchestrator(using temporal) which was used for orchestrating product and store onboarding flows which were spread across various different services and teams.
• Reduced the instances of product not found from 1% to 0.25% reducing the wastage and improving the availability.
• Mobile App for merchant enablement and success during the shift to 10 minute delivery, which helped the merchants concentrate on the metrics that were critical to success of their stores. We scaled from 50 stores to 300+ stores for 10 minute delivery in less than 9 months.

Catalog Management - June 2020 to October 2022

• CMS was a legacy service which was still on Ansible. We migrated the service to Kubernetes based CI/CD pipeline which was by then the standard across the org.
• Revived the legacy service which brought down the deployment times from 2 weeks to 1 day. As this service was the bottleneck in experimentation, our outputs helped speed up the rate of experimentation in the org.
• Worked on the source pricing and source inventory to make the catalog management service light weight and moving the functionality to the respective named services.
• Revamped the flows for the 10 mins delivery to make sure that products and stores could go live in 2 days compared to the prior 10 days.
• Worked with the search team to improve the discovery flows by doing an intent analysis, intent category/product mapping which led to increase in the click through rate for search queries validating our approach.
• Worked with the personalisation team to create personalised sections on home page for user specific recommendations.
• Spearheaded the integration with MagicPin. Created a service which made the process of integrating with other such players in future easy by making it a plug and play integration.
• Successfully implemented the Blinkit in Zomato App which was critical for the integration between the two organisations.

CRM - October 2019 to April 2021

• Came out with an automated identification of "next area of improvement" for the operations team which streamlined the process significantly.
• Integrated chatbot and enhanced the automations to bring down the ARTs from 5 mins to under 1 min while improving the CSAT scores from 3.5 to 4.2
• Implemented auto-refund logic which reduced the need for human interaction by more than 80%
• Improved the fraud identification mechanism by using a mix of internal data, third party service data and dynamic rules.
• Created customer ranking system which made sure that the quality of service for genuine customers didn't go down while successfully bringing down the fraud.

Tech stacks

Across the teams I managed, we were managing six services which used the following stacks.

• NodeJS, Express and React.
• Go, Gin, PLSQL.
• Python, Django, PLSQL.
• Redis, Celery, Kafka for caching message queues

All these services were deployed on AWS and Kubernetes was used for orchestration.

Cofounder at Learning Paths - March 2018 to September 2019

Our goal at Learning Paths was to map global knowledge while helping individuals discover their own interests and learning paths. As a co-founder I was responsible for the engineering, product, design and hiring.

For the un-structured learning we created a chrome extension and an android app that lets users highlight, add notes and tags to the interesting content they find online while using the browser or apps. For the structured learning we created a learning paths generators which would help users generate a learning path in less than 30 seconds by using minimal prompts and TOC/links/pdf files.

The product is still online and is being used by 1000+ people.

http://learningpaths.io

Tech Stack : Mongo, Express, React and NodeJS stack with Elastic Search and Zabbix for monitoring. Using these tech stacks we built frontend web portal for Personal Knowledge Management, Highlighter Chrome extension and REACT Native Android App.

Engineering Manager at AZRI - Nov 2015 to January 2018

Technologies : Angular, Javascript, D3JS, Drupal, Moodle, Magento.

• Responsible for technical architecture, mentoring engineers across the org and scaling up the team.
• Built templates based on open source for intranets which were deployed across various fortune 500 companies.
• Built templates based on open source for "Learning Portal" that was used by the likes of ISB, various IIMs, National Police Academy and NGOs.
• Built a niche online hobby platform/product for a client that has completed 1 lakh+ online classes.

Technical Architect at AZRI - March 2011 to Nov 2015

• Responsible for technical architecture, technical delivery and mentoring engineers across the org.
• Worked on the country based data dashboards for World Bank Data initiative and building the "Innovation Policy Platform" portal which was used by innovation experts from the Global South. Both content and configurations were controlled through RDF format considering the longevity of this initiative.
• Was part of the Drupal Community Core committee and grew the community from 5 people to 800+ vibrant community.
• Organised Drupal Minicamp Bangalore Nov 2014 and Drupal Camp Bangalore July 2015. Speaker at all the DrupalCamps in India covering topics like Drupal Caching framework and configuration management framework.
• Speaker at DrupalCon Asia 2016, Drupal Cache API and performance Optimisation.

Programmer Analyst at Mindtree - Jan 2009 to October 2010

Technologies : Java, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL.

Projects : HR portal for Honeywell, R&D project for device monitoring using SNMP protocol

Academic Performance

Personal Details