I studied machines. Then I got hooked on building products.

I spent five years at IIT Kharagpur getting a Dual Degree in Mechanical Engineering. My thesis was on a YOLOv8-based computer vision system for real-time arc length monitoring, which sounds impressive but mostly involved staring at weld pools at 3 AM. Somewhere in between, I helped run Spring Fest (Asia's largest student festival, 1 Lakh+ footfall) and raised ₹14.68 Lakhs in sponsorship money. That's when I realized I was more excited about building things for people than building models of physical systems.

My first real product job was at Mantrapoynt, a startup in California where I worked remotely from campus. I built an LLM-based chatbot that helped database managers debug issues faster. It was rough and scrappy, but I learned what it feels like to ship something that people actually use to solve a real problem.

Then came Stolo in Bangalore, an options trading platform where I got obsessed with user research. I spent weeks watching Hotjar recordings and talking to traders. 100+ sessions analyzed, 200+ interviews conducted. The insights from that work drove an 18% retention lift. That experience taught me that the best product decisions come from sitting with the data long enough to hear what it's trying to tell you.

Now I'm at BharatPe in Gurgaon, working on products that touch millions of merchants across India. I've launched an ad revenue stream on sound boxes (₹2 Cr ARR), led the Credit Line on UPI implementation, deployed an AI Voice Bot for collections, and once had to orchestrate the emergency reconciliation of ₹53 Cr in erroneous transactions, with zero leakage. That last one was not fun in the moment, but it's a great story now.