Resume

Name: Tapan Karecha
Phone: +91 9989 670950
Email: tapan@karecha.com

Note: As of December 2023, I have transitioned into retirement.

Introduction

As an experienced engineering leader, my most significant contributions are in the following essential areas of software development:

1. Growing high caliber software development teams and People Development
2. Software product design, development, and project execution
3. Software Engineering Practices and Processes

As an engineering leader, I have delivered multiple software products and have consistently improved software engineering practices in my teams to ensure high quality, reliability, and maintainability, and thereby ensuring that the teams direct most of their effort in building new systems and improving existing systems (and not on tackling production issues). I have grown development teams by hiring new talent and mentored team members to enable their career growth within the organization.

Experience

April 2020–November 2023
Worked at Bayer as Director of Engineering, I was the lead for Digital Incubator Engineering (for Asia Pacific). In this role, I addressed critical security issues, streamlined the development process to eliminate waste and improve efficiency (effective branching strategy, automated build and deployment, application versioning, observability and monitoring), and improved collaboration with stakeholders. The team delivered impactful product enhancements, launched new experiments, and reduced error rates in production while simultaneously migrating the engineering operations infrastructure from Climate Engineering to Bayer Engineering.

June 2017–March 2020
Worked at RedMart (now part of Lazada) as Senior Engineering Manager, where I owned the development of Order Management, Fulfillment Gateway, and Last Mile Transport Operations Tech. These verticals are business critical and meet stringent SLAs to ensure business continuity and service uptime. I have launched important new features in all of these areas to enable significant impact on business. My most significant contributions at RedMart were: building a gateway for RedMart orders to enable the channel launch on lazada.sg; building a solution for On Demand delivery; and building a new delivery model called Overnight Deliveries, each of which had a significant impact on business.

June 2015–January 2017
Worked at Urban Ladder as a Director of Engineering, where I owned development and maintenance of SCM, Payments, CRM, Logistics, Order and Inventory management. I joined Urban Ladder in June 2015 as a Senior Engineering Manager responsible for the development of an online store backend stack. I streamlined the Scrum adoption across teams in Tech and even some teams at other business orgs at UL. I successfully delivered large projects in addition to launching and delivering engineering initiatives. And, I hired for the Tech team at all levels, including EMs, SDEs, and SDETs.

March 2013–Nov 2014
Worked at Amazon Development Center, where I grew a team of 5 SDEs to: 14 SDEs, and a Technical Program Manager (TPM). I also hired SDMs, SDEs, QA Engineers, and TPMs for other teams in the GFS business unit at Amazon. I owned Amazon wide, public facing web applications that allow sellers to submit IRS tax forms, which is used by all Amazon businesses including Kindle Publishing, Amazon App Store, Amazon Marketplace, and more. Furthermore, I was recognized for engineering excellence best practices within the team for having the least operational burden, and five nines availability of my web applications and services.

July 2000–Feb 2013
Worked at HP Software as Engineering Manager and, earlier, as a Software Developer. During this tenure I successfully delivered multiple releases of two enterprise grade software products that are used by several large enterprises across the globe including telecom service providers, banks, manufacturers and governments. I transitioned into this role after developing software for these products during my initial years at HP. I also enabled solution delivery teams at some of our largest clients including Vodafone (Germany), Telstra (Australia), and KTF (South Korea) for which I received multiple high profile awards.

Sept 1999–June 2000
Worked at Intelligroup Asia Pvt Ltd as a Sun Certified Java Trainer. This was the time when Java was picking up in adoption and popularity, and was quickly replacing C++ as the defacto language for implementing business applications. I taught Java and this was my first job in the IT industry after working for a decate in the construction industry in various roles.

Feb 1990–August 1999
Worked in various capacities as a civil engineer at private construction companies in Rajkot, Gujrat. During this period, I managed the construction of more than 90 commercial and residential complexes in Rajkot.

Education

Bachelor of Engineering, Saurashtra University, Gujarat, India.