Nisheeth Ranjan

Engineering Leader

2022 - Current

Mentor

2019 - 2021

Lambda School trains people online to be software engineers at no up-front cost. Instead of paying tuition, students can agree to pay a percentage of their income after they're employed, and only if they're making more than $50k per year. If you don't find a job, or don't reach that level of income, you'll never pay a cent.

VP Engineering

2019 - 2021

The MM technology platform helps large Google/Bing Ads spenders optimize their spend and grow their market share: 1. The legacy web app is a Meteor.js frontend with a Python jobs backend that analyzes Google/Bing ad data, restructures ad account hierarchies, and deploys keywords (thousands) / ads (millions). All services run in Docker containers orchestrated via AWS ECS. 2. Over 2020, we built a data pipeline in which Python jobs periodically pull ad account data into our data lake (S3). AWS Athena is the query engine and Tableau is the data visualization layer. 3. Our next gen web app uses Vue.js and GraphQL. We are leveraging the AWS Amplify framework and AWS AppSync to get up and running quickly. Accomplishments: 1. Created process for remote hiring/onboarding. Hired frontend, full stack, QA, Devops and UX/UI professionals and grew the product team from single to double digits. 2. Held regular 1-1s, created written quarterly objectives and career development plans. Mentored/coached the team, groomed new managers for frontend, platform, and QA/Devops teams. Created an eng career ladder to foster productive career growth conversations. 3. Set up a SCRUM process and a regular release cadence. Held sprint planning, review, and retrospective meetings and instituted a culture of continuous improvement. 4. Created/implemented a code review process and a roadmap for automated testing, CI/CD, and Devops improvements to increase quality and development velocity. 5. Worked with PM, CS, Design and Eng teams to improve the legacy web app and create new workflows to integrate it with the next gen app. 6. Collaborated with PM and Eng teams to create/deliver on quarterly product plans informed by engineering capacity data. Increased company-wide visibility into work happening within the engineering team. 7. Incorporated the use of BERT NLP models to generate new ad copy suggestions based on semantic similarity.

AI Scholars 2019 Instructor

2019 - 2020

We started Inspirit AI to inspire students at an early age to understand and apply this powerful technology to improve the world. Our team consists of AI academics and industry professionals from Stanford University who have done cutting-edge research, and have founded several AI startups that have been acquired by large tech corporations. We hope to bring the most recent developments in Artificial Intelligence from courses, labs, and ventures at Stanford to empower high school students globally.

CTO / VP Engineering

2018 - 2019

HoneyBee is a social impact company and a Certified B Corporation®. 6 in 10 Americans can’t cover a $500 unplanned expense so we help employers deliver a much-needed safety net to their employees at zero cost. Employees forced to use financing from high-interest payday lenders can use HoneyBee's short term loans at much lower cost. Our innovative loans take into account accrued paid time off as collateral and allow us to lend to employees with lower credit scores or scant credit history. I architected and implemented a Python/Django based web service to collect borrower payments automatically via SVB's ACH API. I managed remote teams in Toronto and Poland to enhance our web app and create a new Android app that made two types of loans available to our borrowers: a) an Extra Week's Pay ($250 - $2500) loan paid back in 6 payments, and b) Early Pay (up to $75) paid back in 1 payment.

Co-founder / CTO / VP Engineering

2013 - 2018

BrightFunnel is a B2B marketing attribution and forecasting platform used by companies like Docker, Cloudera, Verizon, Concur, and Ellie Mae. Its been a fantastic journey as a co-founder/CTO to build the BrightFunnel web application and platform, raise $12M (angel, seed, and Series A rounds) from top tier investors (SalesForce Ventures, CrossLink Capital, etc.), grow our team to 50 people, hit a multi-million $ annual revenue run rate, and get acquired by Terminus. Highlights: - Built the BrightFunnel web application and platform using AngularJS/HTML/CSS/JS on the frontend and Grails/Groovy/MySQL on the backend. - Managed an agile software development process. Created manual processes and leveraged tools for automation of QA (Jasmine), Continuous Integration (Jenkins), and Release (Chef) processes. - To handle higher traffic and data load, architected/implemented changes for scalability, security, reliability, and performance: a) set up an elastic load balancer in front of a web server pool that can scale up/down based on incoming traffic. b) set up a Cloudera Hadoop cluster running Apache Impala and Spark and moved backend batch data pipeline computation to it. This increased the speed of the computation by ~1000%. c) moved processing of queries requested by the web application from MySQL to the Hadoop cluster. This increased their speed from ~10 minutes to ~10 seconds. d) upgraded our security/compliance posture to pass security reviews of enterprise customers like Concur and Imperva. Created a public security micro-site, security whitepaper, and policies/procedures on an internal wiki. We are now on our way to SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance. - Used AWS API Gateway, Lambda, and Dynamo DB services to create a real time data pipeline for capturing web activity data - Demonstrated a ~24% improvement in prediction accuracy by using machine learning techniques. - Authored a patent titled "Dynamic Attribution Models" filed in June 2016.

Mentor

2015 - 2017

Amplifi helps accelerate the path to seed funding for B2B SaaS startups in South Asia. It is currently operating in many cities across India (Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata) and Hong Kong. See https://www.amplifi.asia/ for details.

Co-founder, CTO

2011 - 2012

IntroRocket was a service that integrated with LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce, and Hubspot to automatically discover and display co-worker connections to business prospects. (2 min intro video at: http://youtu.be/UmY-0f-iTFc) We sold the IP we created at IntroRocket in 2013 to a public company and returned money to our investors. Highlights: - Contributions: fund-raising presentations, business strategy, and technical architecture/design/implementation on our technology stack composed of Ruby on Rails, Nginx, and PostGres running on Ubuntu Linux servers - Integrated with Facebook OpenGraph and LinkedIn APIs - Created a roadmap to use machine learning and NLP techniques to calculate connection strengths between the user and his/her immediate connections. Implemented first version and deployed across website, Salesforce browser plugin, and Hubspot canvas app - Conceived, designed and implemented viral invite flows in the product by creating a single click mechanism for users to invite up to 10 co-worker connections (at a time) on LinkedIn. Achieved a viral factor up to 1.5. - Invented idea, wrote up initial patent proposal, and worked with Morgan Lewis LLP to submit a patent titled “System and Method for Creating Personal Connection Alerts”

Founder, CEO

2007 - 2011

Zamanzar.com was a real estate search portal and virtual brokerage for Indians and NRIs. It provided an end to end solution (online search tools and offline brokerage partner network) for Indian and NRI buyers, renters, and sellers of residential and commercial real estate. I bootstrapped the startup to profitability, hired sales, engineering, and customer service teams, and implemented business processes to create a self-sustaining operation that ran until 2019. Highlights: - Designed and built version 1.0 of Zamanzar.com using the Symfony PHP framework running on a LAMP technology stack. - Built a lead referral partner network across India with revenue share on closed transactions. - Grew the portal to become one of the top 10 real estate web sites in India in 2011 with a database of 10+ million listings and 500,000+ real estate professionals.

Director of Content (US) / Engineering (India)

2006 - 2007

Trulia is a residential real estate search portal. I was employee #8 at Trulia which went on to IPO in 2012 and then got acquired by Zillow for $3.5B in 2014. Highlights: - Grew Trulia’s real estate listings from 0.2M to 2M by striking sales and business development deals with web vendors and media houses and leveraging technology solutions for gathering listings. - Managed sales engineering and customer service departments, created tools, implemented processes, and recruited talent to support a rapidly growing customer base of brokers and online real estate consumers. - Created and managed Trulia’s offshore development team in Noida, India. Grew the team to double digits including an India based senior technology manager. - Conceived, designed, and implemented multiple technology projects leveraging Trulia’s San Francisco engineering team and the India offshore team. These projects included a web based listing submission system, site redesigns, automated data quality checking tools, Trulia trend charts, etc.