Ankit Kumar · Senior Engineering Manager

About me

Engineering instinct.
Organizational clarity.

I am a Senior Engineering Manager with 15+ years of experience building and scaling global engineering teams across Retail, GCC, SaaS, Supply Chain, Media Intelligence, E-Learning, Banking, and Enterprise Platforms. My career spans six companies and eight industries — each role deepening my ability to translate business strategy into precise technical execution at scale.

At Hy-Vee (Aug 2023 – Jun 2026), I lead 25+ engineers across four product lines. Key deliveries: Retail Pricing Platform (ReactJS TypeScript, Apollo GraphQL, .NET 6, PostgreSQL v16, SQL Server, OAuth 2.0, Keycloak) and Product Locator Platform rolled out to 350+ retail stores and 6,000+ mobile devices. Architected 6 production microservices following Clean Architecture and SOLID principles, deployed via Docker and Kubernetes. Applied caching strategies that improved application performance by 65%. Centralized logging and monitoring with Splunk. Own full SDLC: architecture, ADRs, CI/CD, SLA management, and incident response.

At Meltwater Software, I joined as one of the earliest hires in the Bengaluru centre and scaled the engineering team from 2 to 14 developers, delivering a global media intelligence platform across 130+ countries. At ITC Infotech, I was placed as Tech Lead for Eurofins Scientific in Brussels, Belgium — travelling on-site to gather requirements and architecting a modern React + .NET solution replacing legacy systems.

I champion DORA metrics, API lifecycle management, release engineering, enterprise integrations, SAP Greenfield implementation, and AI-assisted development (Claude AI, Gemini, ChatGPT). My OKR-driven delivery culture and Continuous Discovery model drove 40% revenue growth and a 9% CARIS value increase.

RetailSupply ChainSaaS E-Learning / EdTechBankingLogistics Media IntelligenceSAPGCC Life Sciences (Eurofins)Enterprise Platforms

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Visa & Work Authorization

Indian Citizen — no visa, permit, or sponsorship required anywhere in India. Fully authorized to join in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, or remote. Available within 30 days of offer. International exposure: Brussels (Belgium) and Berlin (Germany).

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Distributed Systems & Cloud Architecture

AWS & GCP cloud-native microservices. Event-driven architecture, Kubernetes, API platforms, and high-availability distributed system design at enterprise scale.

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API Lifecycle & Enterprise Integrations

Full API lifecycle: design, versioning, governance, deprecation. SAP ABAP, S4 HANA, CPI Integration, REST/GraphQL patterns, and enterprise data pipelines.

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DORA Metrics & Release Engineering

Elite-tier DORA delivery: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, MTTR. CI/CD governance, SLA ownership, and production operations.

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Incident Management & SLA Ownership

End-to-end incident lifecycle: SEV1–SEV4 classification, on-call rotations, runbooks, MTTD/MTTR benchmarking, blameless post-mortems, and SLO-based alerting.

🤖

AI-Assisted Engineering

Claude AI, Gemini, ChatGPT integrated into engineering workflows. Generative AI for code review, documentation, sprint planning, and developer productivity.

Work experience

Career history

15+ years across six companies and eight industries — most recent role first.

Aug 2023 – Jun 2026

Hy-Vee Inc.

GCC · Bengaluru, India (Remote)

● Current

Senior Engineering Manager

Led 25+ full-stack engineers, Engineering Managers, and Product Managers across four enterprise retail product lines on .NET Core, Node.js, React, GraphQL, AWS, and GCP. Owned full SDLC from architecture and PRD through deployment and production support across Retail Pricing, MRPM, Product Locator, and Mobile Store Operations platforms. Domains: Retail, Grocery E-Commerce, Pricing Platform, SAP.

Platform Delivery & Architecture

Retail Pricing Platform: Led end-to-end architecture and engineering delivery using ReactJS (TypeScript), Apollo GraphQL, .NET 6, PostgreSQL v16, SQL Server, and Keycloak. Defined solution architecture, authored ADRs, implemented secure OAuth 2.0 and RBAC authentication, and established CI/CD, observability, release governance, and QA strategy

Product Locator Platform: Built from scratch and rolled out to 350+ retail stores across 6,000+ mobile devices. Directed cross-functional teams across Android (Kotlin), ReactJS, HapiJS, Node.js, PostgreSQL v16, Keycloak, and Fastlane CI/CD. Owned MoSCoW prioritization, PRDs, release roadmap, UAT, and production rollout. Enabled real-time item lookup and barcode-based shelf location

Mobile Retail Pricing & Merchandise Platform: Developed backend services using .NET Core API, PostgreSQL, and Concourse CI covering item maintenance, ordering, receiving, vendor management, and product information workflows

Architected and owned 6 production microservices following Clean Architecture and SOLID principles, deployed via Docker and Kubernetes, supporting 350+ retail stores and 6,000+ mobile devices

Engineered scalable full-stack solutions using .NET Core, React, GraphQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and GCP; applied caching strategies that improved application performance by 65%

Secured APIs using OAuth 2.0; implemented centralized logging and monitoring with Splunk; maintained 99.9% uptime for systems serving 300+ web application users on a 3–4 week release cadence

Led cloud migration: AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, EC2, CloudFormation; championed DORA metrics; owned SAP Greenfield Implementation and API lifecycle management across REST and GraphQL integrating SAP enterprise systems

Scaled org from 2 to 20+ engineers; mentored EMs, Senior Engineers, and Tech Leads; partnered with C-level leaders on roadmaps, budgets, KPIs, and OKR-driven execution

Incident Management & SLA Ownership

Defined and enforced SLA tiers (P1: 99.95% uptime, P2: 99.9%) for four mission-critical retail platforms; maintained zero P1 SLA breaches across 77+ enterprise product releases

Built end-to-end incident management framework: on-call rotations, SEV1–SEV4 severity classification, escalation runbooks, war-room protocols, and executive communication templates for production outages

Established Datadog SLO monitors and PagerDuty alerting; implemented centralized logging with Splunk; reduced MTTD from 45 minutes to under 8 minutes and achieved MTTR consistently under 1 hour for P1 incidents

Implemented blameless post-mortem culture: mandatory RCA within 24 hours of SEV1/SEV2 events, action items tracked to closure, learnings shared across engineering

Designed rollback and disaster recovery playbooks; implemented feature flags and canary deployments to minimize blast radius; applied circuit breaker patterns across distributed microservices

Product, Growth & AI

Adopted Continuous Discovery model — drove 40% revenue growth from new user onboarding and 9% CARIS value increase through A/B experimentation and data-driven product decisions

Delivered 77+ enterprise product releases; onboarded 234+ enterprise customers; deployed Product Locator to 350+ stores and 6,000+ devices

Introduced AI-assisted development using Claude AI, Gemini, and ChatGPT — improving developer velocity, code quality, and documentation standards across the team

.NET Core / .NET 6ReactJS (TypeScript)Apollo GraphQL Node.js / HapiJSPostgreSQL v16SQL Server Android (Kotlin)DockerKubernetes OAuth 2.0Keycloak (RBAC)Fastlane CI/CD Concourse CIGitHub ActionsAWSGCP SplunkDatadogPagerDuty Clean ArchitectureSOLID Principles SAP GreenfieldDORA Metrics SLA ManagementIncident Management API LifecycleClaude AI

Oct 2022 – Mar 2023

Babbel GmbH

Berlin, Germany (On-site)

5 months

Engineering Manager

Led engineering teams at Europe's leading language-learning SaaS platform serving millions of global users across 14 languages. Worked on-site in Berlin — experienced in German business culture, GDPR compliance, and English/German bilingual stakeholder communication. Domains: EdTech, SaaS, Consumer Platform, B2C.

Managed engineering teams delivering Babbel's language-learning platform; drove platform feature delivery, API quality improvements, and Agile team rituals in a fast-paced product-led organization

Established Agile and DevOps operating models — CI/CD pipelines, release engineering governance, automated testing, trunk-based development, and code quality gates

Owned production SLA commitments of 99.9% uptime; built on-call rotation, SEV1–SEV3 incident severity matrix, and structured runbooks; reduced MTTR through systematic incident response processes

Implemented SLO-based alerting with error budget tracking — weekly error budget reports enabling proactive reliability investment before SLA thresholds were threatened

Managed enterprise integrations, API versioning strategy, and distributed systems performance optimization for a global multi-region architecture

Experienced in GDPR-compliant engineering delivery, European regulatory frameworks, and bilingual (English/German) stakeholder communication

SaaSEdTechCI/CD Release EngineeringObservability SLA ManagementIncident Management SLOs & Error BudgetsGDPR Berlin On-siteDistributed Systems

Oct 2018 – Jun 2022

Meltwater Software

Bengaluru, India

3 yrs 8 mos

Engineering Manager

Joined as one of the earliest engineering hires in the Bengaluru centre. Scaled the engineering team from 2 to 14 developers — hiring, onboarding, and mentoring across frontend, backend, and QA. Managed full engineering delivery of Meltwater's core media intelligence products (Newsletter, Daily Digest Report, Explore, Reach) serving enterprise customers across 130+ countries. Domains: Media Intelligence, SaaS, News & Social Analytics, Global Platform.

Scaled team from 2 to 14 engineers from the ground up; established hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and career development frameworks across frontend, backend, and QA disciplines

Designed and evolved platform architecture handling large-scale media monitoring, content aggregation, and analytics pipelines supporting real-time news and social data

Established engineering practices from scratch: code review standards, CI/CD pipelines, sprint cadence, technical roadmap planning, and observability across distributed services

Owned SLA commitments for real-time media monitoring APIs — defined uptime, data freshness, and latency SLAs (sub-5-second data delivery) contractually committed to enterprise clients across 130+ countries

Built production incident response process from scratch: severity definitions, on-call rota, escalation policy, and customer-facing communication templates for SLA-impacting events

Introduced circuit breaker patterns and dead-letter queue handling; reduced customer-reported SLA incidents by 60% year-over-year through proactive monitoring and systematic failure resolution

Drove cross-functional collaboration with global teams across Europe and North America, aligning engineering priorities with business outcomes

Media IntelligenceSaaSREST APIs MicroservicesReal-time Systems API LifecycleSLA Management Incident ManagementTeam Scaling (2→14) Global Platform130+ Countries

Oct 2016 – Sep 2018

ITC Infotech

Bengaluru, India · Brussels, Belgium

2 yrs

Lead Consultant — Tech Lead

Placed as Tech Lead for Eurofins Scientific, Brussels, Belgium — one of Europe's largest laboratory testing and life sciences organizations. Travelled on-site to Brussels to conduct technical discovery with client stakeholders, then returned to India and architected a modern React + .NET full-stack solution to replace legacy systems. Domains: Enterprise Consulting, Life Sciences, React, .NET.

Travelled to Brussels, Belgium — conducted full technical handover of existing systems, gathered requirements from Eurofins stakeholders, and set up the entire delivery team and technology stack from scratch in India

Architected a modern React + .NET full-stack solution to replace legacy systems; defined technical standards, development processes, sprint structure, and delivery milestones

Acted as primary technical bridge between Brussels-based Eurofins client and Bengaluru delivery team; managed cross-continental stakeholder communication and alignment throughout the engagement

Advised on cloud migration, API lifecycle management, distributed systems design, DevOps transformation, and SLA frameworks covering uptime targets, incident severity classifications, and escalation paths

React.NETLife Sciences Enterprise ConsultingAPI Lifecycle Distributed SystemsSLA Frameworks Brussels (On-site)

May 2013 – Sep 2016

Tesco HSC

Bengaluru, India (GCC)

3 yrs 4 mos

Sr. Software Engineer

Contributed to Tesco's Bengaluru GCC — one of the world's first and largest retail engineering centres — delivering supply chain and retail platform features for a top-3 global grocer. Operated within a 24/7 production environment with strict uptime and SLA requirements. Domains: Retail, Supply Chain, GCC, UK Retail.

Built and maintained high-availability distributed retail systems supporting Tesco's UK online and in-store operations: pricing, inventory, and order management services serving millions of daily users

Contributed to supply chain, logistics, and inventory management platform engineering — built enterprise integrations between warehouse, distribution, and store-facing systems

Participated in on-call rotation for mission-critical retail systems with 99.99% uptime SLA; responded to production incidents, conducted root cause analysis, and implemented fixes to prevent recurrence

Gained foundational experience in ITIL-based incident management, change management processes, and release governance in a structured enterprise GCC environment

Developed deep domain expertise in retail systems, supply chain workflows, and large-scale GCC operating models — foundation for future engineering leadership roles in retail

RetailSupply ChainGCC Distributed SystemsHigh Availability Enterprise IntegrationsITIL SLA AdherenceIncident Response

Mar 2011 – Apr 2013

HCL Technologies

India

2 yrs 1 mo

Software Engineer

Early-career software engineering across banking, enterprise, and logistics domains at a global IT services organization. Built strong foundations in ITIL-based service management, SLA-driven production support, enterprise integrations, and agile delivery in regulated, high-stakes environments.

Developed full-stack banking and enterprise applications across SDLC: requirements, technical design, development, testing, UAT support, and production deployment with change management sign-off

Contributed to enterprise integration projects: designed data pipelines, implemented API contracts, and built system-to-system communication layers across banking back-office platforms

Supported production banking systems under ITIL V3 framework — triaged and resolved incidents within contractually committed SLA response and resolution windows; worked L2/L3 production support rotation

BankingEnterprise Platforms Enterprise IntegrationsITIL V3 SLA ManagementL2/L3 Support Incident ResponseLogistics

DORA metrics & career impact

Engineering excellence
by the numbers

I measure engineering health through DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics — the gold-standard framework for software delivery performance. At Hy-Vee, I drove improvements across all four DORA indicators, moving the engineering organization into the Elite performer tier within 12 months of joining.

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Deployment Frequency

Multiple / week

From monthly releases to multiple weekly deployments via CI/CD automation, GitHub Actions, and release governance

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Lead Time for Changes

Hours, not days

Reduced from days to hours through automated pipelines, 5-commits principal, and streamlined code review

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Change Failure Rate

< 5%

Maintained below 5% through automated testing, code quality gates, release governance, and canary releases

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MTTR

< 1 hour

Established incident runbooks, Datadog SLO monitors, PagerDuty alerting, and on-call rotations

25⁺

Engineers managed

Full-stack ICs, Engineering Managers & Product Managers across multiple geographic locations simultaneously

234⁺

Enterprise customers

Onboarded to Hy-Vee retail platform via redesigned user onboarding program driven by Continuous Discovery model

77⁺

Production releases

Enterprise-grade releases shipped across 4 product lines with zero P1 SLA breaches

40^%

Revenue uplift

From new user onboarding via Continuous Discovery model — directly tied to A/B experimentation outcomes

9^%

CARIS value increase

Total platform value growth through feature enhancement, product optimization, and A/B experimentation

6K⁺

Mobile devices deployed

Product Locator Platform rolled out to 350+ retail stores across 6,000+ mobile devices; 65% performance improvement via caching

Technical skills

What I bring to the table

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Engineering Leadership

Engineering StrategyOKR-driven DeliveryPeople ManagementOrg ScalingTechnical RoadmapsStakeholder ManagementHiring & RetentionCareer DevelopmentProgram ManagementAgile / ScrumMoSCoW Prioritization

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Cloud & Architecture

AWSGCPDistributed SystemsMicroservicesKubernetesEvent-Driven ArchitectureLambda / ServerlessDynamoDBEC2 / CloudFormationPostgreSQL v16SQL ServerMongoDBAWS RDS

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Technology Stack

Node.jsC# / .NET CoreReactJS (TypeScript)Apollo GraphQLHapiJSPythonJavaScriptAndroid (Kotlin)Keycloak (RBAC)OAuth 2.0Fastlane CI/CDConcourse CIDockerClean ArchitectureSOLID Principles

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API Lifecycle & Release Engineering

API Lifecycle ManagementRelease EngineeringEnterprise IntegrationsSAP ABAPS4 HANACPI IntegrationSAP BASISSAP Greenfield ImplementationAPI Design & VersioningAPI DeprecationREST / GraphQLAPI GatewayRelease GovernanceADR AuthoringIntegration Patterns

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DORA, Incident Management & Observability

DORA MetricsIncident ManagementSLA ManagementGitHub ActionsDatadogSplunkPagerDutyGitLab CI/CDConcourse CIGrafanaKibanaAppDynamicsSLOs & Error BudgetsBlameless Post-mortemsRCADisaster RecoverySite Reliability

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AI-Assisted Engineering & Emerging Technologies

Claude AIGemini AIChatGPT / OpenAIAI-Assisted DevelopmentGenerative AILLM WorkflowsAI Engineering ProductivityPrompt Engineering

Core expertise

Deep specializations

🏗️API Engineering

REST & GraphQL API design

API lifecycle management

Apollo GraphQL / HapiJS

API versioning & deprecation

ADR authoring & governance

⚙️System Architecture

Distributed systems design

Microservices architecture

Event-driven architecture

High-availability patterns

Solution architecture & ADRs

🔗Enterprise Integrations

SAP ABAP & SAP Greenfield

S4 HANA & CPI Integration

SAP BASIS & Security

Enterprise data pipelines

Keycloak RBAC & auth

🚨Incident Management

SEV1–SEV4 classification

On-call rotation design

Runbook & DR playbooks

Blameless post-mortems / RCA

MTTD & MTTR optimization

🚀Release Engineering

CI/CD pipeline design

Release governance frameworks

Feature flags & canary releases

Blue/green deployments

Fastlane CI/CD (mobile)

📊Product & Data

A/B testing & experimentation

Continuous Discovery model

MoSCoW prioritization

Engineering metrics & KPIs

IIM Calcutta — Business Analytics

Leadership philosophy

How I lead engineering teams

Principles built across 15+ years and six companies — from early-career IC to leading organizations of 25+.

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Outcome over activity

OKR-driven execution. Teams own measurable business outcomes, not just delivery tasks. Every sprint connects to a clear goal.

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Psychological safety first

Engineers do their best work when they can take risks, speak up, and learn from failure without blame — blameless culture, always.

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High engineering standards

Code reviews, 5-commits principal, automated testing, ADRs, and release governance. Quality is a culture, not a phase.

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Grow people deliberately

Structured career plans, stretch assignments, and real mentorship. I have grown ICs into EMs and EMs into senior leaders.

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Technical vision clarity

Multi-year roadmaps, solution architecture, API lifecycle strategy, and tech debt management — always anchored to business direction.

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Data-driven decisions

DORA metrics, MTTD/MTTR tracking, A/B experiments, SLO dashboards, and error budget reports drive every significant call.

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Stakeholder partnership

C-suite alignment, cross-functional collaboration, and translating business strategy into actionable engineering execution.

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Continuous improvement

Retrospectives, blameless post-mortems, and a culture that treats every incident and every sprint as a learning opportunity.

Education & certifications

Academic & professional credentials

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Executive Programme — Business Analytics & Data Visualization

IIM Calcutta — Indian Institute of Management

2019 · Executive Education

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Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA)

Bangalore University

2010 · Undergraduate Degree

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AWS Solutions Architect Associate

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Certification · Cloud Architecture

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ITIL V3 Foundation · Certified Scrum Master (CSM) · Scrum Product Owner

Run the Bank (RTB) · Retail Supply Chain Management

Certifications · Service Management & Agile

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SAP Training — ABAP Development, Basis, Security & Integrations

SAP

Professional Training · SAP Greenfield / Enterprise Systems

🌐

Languages

English C1 (Professional) · Hindi C2 (Native) · German A2 (Basic — actively improving)

International exposure: Brussels, Belgium · Berlin, Germany

AnkitKumar

Engineering instinct.Organizational clarity.

Career history

Engineering excellenceby the numbers

What I bring to the table

Deep specializations

How I lead engineering teams

Academic & professional credentials

Let’s buildsomething great.

Ankit
Kumar

Engineering instinct.
Organizational clarity.

Engineering excellence
by the numbers

Let’s build
something great.