Karthik Gandhi on Engineering Leadership Styles, Feedback by Travis Kalanick, & US vs. Singapore Tech Culture - E65

Karthik Gandhi is an engineering leader at Stripe. His current role is to help Stripe expand into SEA and India. Before Stripe, Karthik worked at Grab, where he managed critical economic levers such as Pricing, Surge Engine, Forecasting, Demand Shaping, Supply Shaping, and the ML platform that powered it all. Karthik built his career in Silicon Valley before moving to Singapore. He started his career at pre-IPO VMware as a kernel developer. Later he started an NLP startup (General Sentiment) with his advisor Prof. Steven Skiena. Even though the company didn't succeed, the experience shaped his career. Karthik was inspired to become a leader at Microsoft, where he was part of Azure team. His most significant career breakthrough came when he joined Uber as one of the early employees and spent close to 4 years there. During his time at Uber, Karthik helped Uber build its business in China, built its core infrastructure that helped Uber scale to millions of transactions/second. Later, Karthik transitioned to build autonomous vehicles and trucks. Karthik became part of the Uber Freight team when the automated trucks program was suspended and helped build a marketplace from scratch.  Karthik graduated with a Master of Science from Stony Brook University, New York, and later did a distributed systems specialization with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He moved to Singapore in June 2019, where he lives with his wife (Software Engineer@Facebook) and his 3-year-old daughter. He is into adventure sports such as ice climbing, diving, canyoning, skiing, and any outdoor activity depending on the season. His indoor activities include reading books about leadership and human evolution - past, present, and the future, tinkering with my Raspberry PI cluster for distributed systems development. Shownotes at www.jeremyau.com/blog/karthik-gandhi You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/karthik-gandhi-on-engineering-leadership-styles-feedback-by-travis-kalanick-us-vs-singapore-tech-culture