Hey, I'm Ketan 👋

I’m a builder at heart — someone who ships, debugs, scales, and improves systems with a bias for clarity and action. Over 20+ years, I’ve earned my stripes leading engineering efforts across startups and enterprises, always grounding my leadership in technical depth and high-leverage execution.

I specialize in driving engineering efficiency — from building modular platforms and scalable data pipelines to enabling faster iteration loops through automation and clean architecture. I’ve consistently been a force multiplier: mentoring engineers, shaping team culture, and unblocking execution through context, not control.

As a team player and mentor, I focus on growing autonomy and accountability in others while still getting my hands dirty when needed. My leadership combines product sense with systems thinking, helping teams align technical priorities to what truly moves the needle — faster cycles, better decisions, and resilient systems.

What I Do

I work across the full engineering stack, with particular depth in:

• Technical Leadership — System design, DDD, architecture, roadmapping, team building, mentoring, cross-functional leadership
• Backend Engineering — Go, Java, Scala, Python, Spring, Akka, microservices, event-driven systems
• Data & Analytics — Kafka, Spark, Flink, Airflow, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Databricks, real-time + batch pipelines
• Cloud & Infrastructure — AWS, Azure, Terraform, serverless, CI/CD, observability, SRE practices

Recent Work

Consulting Software Architect – Lana | OutOfTheBlue

Jul 2024 – Present

Strategic advisor to Lana.Eco (Singapore), architecting a data platform processing public markets data across 5 countries (>1B data points).

Delivered a low-code, registry-based business intelligence framework for OutOfTheBlue.ai, enabling a quick turnaround for new business use cases.

Co-founder, Tech & Product at 8Sapience

Apr 2024 – Jun 2025

Built an alternate research platform for equity analysts and investors with 150+ paying users. Shipped web app, search-grounded RAG, and Chrome extension. Built 70+ data pipelines processing 2K+ news articles daily from 50+ business sources with sentiment analysis and NER. Optimized for <100ms stat lookups and 5x improvement in research productivity.

Principal Technical Architect at Splore

May 2023 - Apr 2024

Led architecture and implementation of a multi-tenant, terabyte-scale search and data platform. Reduced search query latency by 40% through advanced indexing and distributed cache optimization. Enabled domain-specific schema evolution with minimal downtime.

Technical Director, Engineering at Druva

Jan 2022 - May 2023

Directed platform-wide modernization; led 12-member team building unified data lakehouse using Delta Lake and Iceberg. Achieved 30% cost reduction through efficient incremental processing with resumable and on-demand compute.

Earlier Highlights

• Finaxar — Re-architected card transaction engine (Scala, Akka, Clickhouse), achieving 2x throughput and 3x fault tolerance
• Symantec — Architected real-time event ingestion system handling 10B+ events/day across 600+ nodes globally
• Adsparx (Acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery) — Scaled ad platform to millions of daily video impressions

Education

B.E. Electronics from V.J.T.I. Mumbai (1999-2003)