Engineer, Product Manager, Director — In That Order

I grew up in India — Chennai and Mumbai — and came to Minnesota for grad school at the University of Minnesota. As a kid, I was the one taking things apart to see how they worked, then building something new from whatever was lying around. That creative impulse — the high of making something exist that didn't before — is what pulled me into engineering. From taking apart toy RC cars as a kid in Chennai to leading engineering teams in Minnesota — I'm grateful for the people who made that journey possible, and for the curiosity and relentlessness that kept me going.

My career has covered a lot of ground — deliberately. I've been a hands-on embedded systems engineer, a product manager defining roadmaps and P&L, and a director building and leading multi-disciplinary teams. I've worked in aerospace, industrial automation, and professional AV. I've built hardware products, firmware, and software platforms. I believe the best engineering leaders understand the whole picture — not just the code or the circuits, but the business model, the customer problem, and the team dynamics that determine whether something actually ships.

I started my career as an electrical engineer at Joby Aviation, working on eVTOL aircraft systems in collaboration with NASA. I designed the schematics, did the board layout, wrote the firmware, and modeled the mechanical enclosure for a motor controller. It taught me what breadth actually looks like. I spent nine years at Rockwell Automation, growing from an individual contributor into a product management role, learning how to build products at scale and make engineering decisions that align with business strategy.

Today at Williams AV, I lead a team building professional audio and assistive communication products. These are the systems that make courtrooms, classrooms, and conference rooms work for people with hearing loss and language barriers. It's technology that matters — and that connection between engineering work and real human impact is what I've always been chasing.

What I've learned across these three very different environments — a venture-backed startup, a Fortune 500 multinational, and a PE-backed small business — is that the skills transfer imperfectly. What makes you effective at a 10,000-person company can actually slow you down at a 200-person one, and vice versa. Having worked across all three, I've built intuition for which playbook fits which situation.