Q. How was the academic shift from BITS to Carnegie Mellon?
A: The transition from BITS to CMU was transformative. While BITS gave me intellectual freedom and strong fundamentals, CMU demanded a different level of intensity—constant engagement with cutting-edge research and a relentless academic pace. What struck me most was how strategic course selection became at CMU; each class wasn't just an academic requirement but a career pivot point. This taught me early that in competitive environments, every decision compounds. That strategic mindset—understanding how individual choices cascade into larger outcomes—has been invaluable throughout my career.
Q. Looking back, were there any moments early in your career, perhaps even at BITS, that shaped your approach to solving large scale technical problems?
A: Absolutely. Early in my career at Microsoft, fresh out of BITS, I worked on a feature that made it to production. A bug I introduced had the potential to affect millions of users—thankfully it was caught before widespread impact, but the experience was formative. It taught me that writing code isn’t just about solving the immediate problem; it’s about understanding the ripple effects of your decisions. From that point forward, I became obsessed with robust testing, comprehensive code reviews, and building systems that fail gracefully. That incident fundamentally shifted my perspective from ‘does this work?’ to ‘how might this break, and how do we prevent that?’ It’s a mindset that has served me well in every large-scale challenge since.
Q. You’ve worked across top tech companies—Microsoft Azure, Facebook, and now Netflix. What were your biggest challenges during these transitions, and how did you adapt your mindset and skills?
A: Each transition taught me that technical excellence is table stakes—the real differentiator is execution at scale. At Microsoft, I learned that shipping code to millions of users means every decision has multiplicative impact. Moving to Facebook showed me how to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you're often building the plane while flying it. At Netflix, I've focused on building systems that don't just work, but that teams can confidently iterate on.
The biggest shift in my thinking has been recognizing that as complexity increases, the bottleneck moves from technical problems to organizational ones. Now I spend as much time aligning stakeholders and resolving competing priorities as I do architecting systems. The engineers who scale their impact are those who can translate between technical depth and business strategy.
Q. How has the BITS tag or alumni network influenced your career?
A: The BITS tag carries weight, especially in India and within the global BITSian network. While I haven’t leaned on it much personally, it’s often a great icebreaker, whether for referrals, mentorship, or co-founder searches. The real power is in the batch-level connections, many of my batchmates are now in influential roles across industries, and we’ve maintained a strong network that continues to be valuable.
Q. Now that you’re at Netflix working on streaming infrastructure, what skills beyond coding do you think are becoming more important in the AI era?
A: As AI democratizes coding, the premium shifts to skills that are uniquely human and strategic. Product intuition becomes critical—understanding not just how to build something, but what's worth building and why. At Netflix, this means constantly asking: 'How does this technical decision impact the member experience?'