Chandan Gupta

After leaving Magicpin amidst covid-19, I was planning a startup in the Food Tech delivery space.  However funding fell through at the last minute and I decided to take up an opportunity to work with Expedia again with the Flights team.  Flights is around half a billion dollar business for Expedia which is revamping the shopping path at the moment. It is 6 months into this stint and I am working on migrating ~15 Point of Sales at Expedia to PWA and to improve the platform performance with a 20 member engineering team. We have achieved 60% reduction in front end latency overheads within a span of 3-4 months

I joined the org when apps team was going through a lean phase. Retention and team motivation were a problem and as a result deliveries and product hygiene/UX were suffering. I achieved a turn around by

1. Scaled the team from 6 to  12 high quality engineers in a span of 4 months.

2. Brought discipline and strong work culture to the team, improved process orientation and sensitivity to key hygiene metrics. Improved team morale through regular 1:1s , solving cross functional problems and deep personal engagement with the team

3. Worked with design team and product stakeholders to continuously improve product UX which has led to significant improvement in various product metrics.

4. Conceptualised and launched the unique UPI cashback product at Magicpin with a super smooth payment flow aimed at reducing friction for users. 

As a result we were able to significantly improve our user experience putting us in comparison with Zomato, PayTm and other high quality products. 

At Expedia, I helped build a unified platform for user generated content to aid collection, curation and playback. In 10 months with a 15 member team, we have the following significant achievements 

1. Major initiatives to onboard Hotels.com & Homeaway on Expedia reviews platform are underway. Expected to create significant platform leverage and synergies across brands

2. Dynamic collection platform, a customisable personalized platform to collect feedback from travellers. We brought down the time taken to launch a collection test from months to a few weeks. 

3. Launched MVP for Answer traveller questions product, help travellers get answer to their questions prior to booking a property. 

4. Maintaining, scaling and optimizing our APIs which handle as much load as 7k TPS with performance expectations of 99.9% response times < 100msec

I am involved in Team building, hiring, coaching, mentoring, working with product & team to come up with project schedules, evangelizing, conflict resolution, coordination with stake holders, helping team member solve roadblocks technical or otherwise.

I joined WYDR at a stage where the business was ahead of its technology. The infra was unstable and latencies were high. In 3 months I helped WYDR sort out their technology stack.By moving to cloud and optimizing code & SQL queries, we got a performance improvement of 10X. Some other initiatives which helped were splitting the monolith into microservices based architecture. I also launched the Personalization initiative in the company and helped moved conversion up by 40% in repeat users. 

My startup Phone Warrior got acquired by Snapdeal in Oct 2015. Snapdeal was an interesting journey to see an organisation at that scale move tremendously fast. I have helped create Personalization engine & A/B testing framework called CEE within Snapdeal. After delivering CEE v1, I moved on to User Growth Engineering. I helped personalize and streamline all outbound communication, ran the Refer n Earn program, ran social shopping experiments like "Save with Friends". 

I bootstrapped Phone Warrior's high tech products from ground zero in two years. I built first app on Blackberry on Android with the help of interns and freshers, achieving daily traction of 1k installs per day with a total spend of less than $5k.  I also wrote the initial ML  algorithms,  architected the backend and pioneered several innovations including the concept of phone graph in the company.

We generated good interest in the venture community and successfully closed a round of seed funding with Lightspeed Venture Partners in Dec 2013 and reached a scale of 6 million installs prior to exiting to Snapdeal.

We did some interesting and exciting work of mining the massive mobile social graph of 500 million nodes and multi billion edges to generate insights around - favoured service providers, influential and affluent users

Visinor Technologies, was a test bed to try out my startup ideas. I played around with myriads of ideas and technology in the internet and mobile domain, before zeroing down on Phone Warrior as the most promising candidate in early 2013. 

I built and architected several services, notably Wireless Message Routing Service (WMRS) which was directly in the path of SMS and MMS delivery in US with customers like Verizon, Alltel, Google Voice. This service handled a 100  million queries every day with sub 10 mSec latency and 99.999% uptime.

I also developed other innovative products like Text Everywhere which allowed mobile users to send and receive SMS/MMS on internet capable devices like tablet, laptops etc.

I co founded Rambhai.com along with couple of IIM-A alumni. We were moonlighting and attempting to build the "digg" (a social democratic media and content discovery platform) of India in 2007. I helped conceptualise the product and developed the website on LAMP stack single handedly. We were ranked amongst top 500 websites on India with a few million of hits every month with just 1 member engineering team

At Infosys, I go an opportunity to work for an american banking giant , Bank of America. I worked for them offshore for a year and then lead projects successfully at onsite locations in Atlanta and California. I got exposure to thick banking applications, java & c++ middleware, web technologies and even mainframes. I enjoyed my time there  since I always got the most challenging assignments and was awarded for excellent performance.