What is your educational and career background in brief?
I am a Father of two, a husband, US Citizen who was born and brought up in Bombay, India. After my Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from India, I moved to the USA for my Master’s in Industrial engineering in 1991. Since then I have worked for many large Fortune 500 companies in the Bay Area, focused on the Smart Grid domain, and after spending 27 years in the US, came back to India in 2017. We moved back to the US in May of 2022 when I took up the position of Chief Data Scientist at HydroPoint. Our daughter is a senior, at the University of California, Berkeley in Aug-2021, majoring in Environmental Science and a minor in Data Science. My son is in the 10th grade at a private school in Chatsworth, Los Angeles.
I am currently enrolled in Analytics Vidya’s Pinnacle GenAI, a Certification course for 18 months, which I expect to complete by Summer-25. The entire curriculum is here.
I also plan to get a ESG Certification from the Global Reporting Institure, a premier standards based body out of Europe. Its curriculum can be reviewed here.
What are you currently doing (regarding your career) and how did you get there?
I am currently an Industry Consultant for the DERMS (Distributed Energy – solar, wind, batteries, EV) helping utility customer prepare and implement a strategy around their DERMS implementation so that they can use residential customers’ generation to balance and stabilize the grid while not increasing their own generation, also helps residential customer monetize their investment in DE. Previously (May22-Apr-24), I was the Chief Data Scientist at HydroPoint, an enterprise water conservation company based out of Petaluma, CA. I manage a large team of data scientists and analysts and we are in charge of building the single-source-of-truth platform database of all our data and then using that to pivot the company to make decisions based on sound logic and data. I have always been a Smart Grid executive having worked with many top companies in the clean energy space for instance – Siemens, Xylem, Trilliant, and Schlumberger. I also have had my share of start-ups – two of them, both got acquired by other energy companies for at least 5x returns to the investors. On the technical side of things, I am passionate about building enterprise cloud applications using the latest AI and machine learning technologies, for the clean energy domain that can make people’s lives simpler.
In terms of the work you do, what aspects are you most passionate about and why?
My soul-oriented job would involve three (3) things, namely: Customer-facing Technical Sales and Account Management including project execution (2) Software Engineering Delivery – managing multiple dev teams, and lastly (3) People management – Hiring, Mentoring, Giving them a path to grow and bloom. I just love to be in front of customers, understanding their pain points and delivering a solution that delights them. I love to manage a large group of technical folks – UX designers, programmers, testers, technical writers, etc and manage multiple software development projects simultaneously. There is something about juggling multiple balls in the air and being on top of all of it that gives me a HIGH. This also allows me to mentor and open doors for many members of my team who would otherwise have fallen through the cracks. The warmth this provides when they acknowledge such an opportunity given to them makes life worth living. The opportunity to hire, give bonuses to the worthy, and make a difference in their families’ lives, is an honor and a privilege and I cherish such opportunities.
The other aspect I truly and deeply care about is to make the workplace a fun place for people to come and for employees to look at the workplace and colleagues as their “second home & family”. Towards that, I make sure that in the workplace we work hard but play even harder, celebrate all festivals, and do not miss any opportunity to have fun and keep the mood lighter. Halloween Day costume prizes and the “White Elephant” game during Xmas are my favorites.
What do you consider some of your biggest professional and personal accomplishments?
My leadership style is that of being an “empathetic servant leader”, something I embody in my day-to-day dealings with people and customers. Displaying empathy towards my colleagues, my team members, and especially the people who work for me comes naturally to me. People have complimented me for being a fun leader who makes time to listen to everyone and is very approachable. That is my biggest professional accomplishment.
On the personal side, I recently (Dec-2022) completed a CTO program offered by Wharton and an M.Sc degree in AI and ML from Liverpool John Moores University, UK (Feb-2023). Before that during the COVID days at home, I completed a PGP course on “AI for leaders” and I was top of the class of 44 other like-minded industry veterans. The thesis topic for my M.Sc degree was in Deep Reinforcement Learning as applicable to Process Control Systems. Learning Python coding, a new programming language focussed on AI/ML algorithms has given me renewed confidence to always keep learning.
“One stops living when one stops learning”
What are you looking for right now?
Looking for an opportunity to setup a GCC (Global Capability Center) in India for a well funded startup in the water conservation or a clean-energy technology company. The ideal company will be a small to mid-sized well-funded startup company going through a growth phase where they need people who can pick the ball and run with it. Less bureaucracy is better. I will be the bridge between your customers, technical teams & your senior management team in the US, and the large engineering team in India. I can either be based out of the company HQ in the US or work out of the India center. Either option works for me and my family.