About
I run technology for a group of property and mortgage businesses in Dubai. Three companies, one technology function, and a fairly unglamorous list of things that have to work: leads arriving from partners on their phones, consultants moving forty of them a week, clients who want to know where their mortgage application actually is, and a proposal engine that has to be right, because a wrong number in a mortgage document is not a rounding error.
I stayed in it for the same reason I spent four and a half years under core banking platforms. A mortgage is the largest transaction most people ever make, and the figures in the document are the ones a family plans a decade around. Systems that carry money have a property I like: they are either right, or they are a problem. There is no third state where it mostly works and nobody notices.
How I Got Here
The line starts earlier than the CV does. I was selected into Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya on a national entrance exam. The Navodaya schools are free, fully residential and run one to a district, and they exist to find ability outside the cities and pay for it. I took computer science as my fifth subject at Intermediate, and in 2009 I chose Artificial Intelligence as my final-semester paper, when it was a niche entry on a syllabus rather than a career anybody was planning. Neither was the obvious choice at the time. Both were the same choice.
I started work in 2011 as a system administrator in Lucknow, looking after servers and support queues for a media company. The fifteen years since went, roughly: web and e-commerce systems in Gurugram, then Ogilvy & Mather, where I ran fifty-plus AWS servers and the Cloudera stack behind campaign analytics for one of the world’s best-known advertising networks, then Dubai, where the work turned from running other people’s platforms to owning them.
At DSSC Tech Ltd., a fintech building core banking platforms for financial institutions, I spent four and a half years as Head of IT and Security: AWS infrastructure, forty-plus microservices, PCI DSS compliance, and the parts of the job nobody writes case studies about. Monitoring, incident response, being the person who gets called.
Since 2023 I have been on the product side of the same skill set, which is the part I would not go back from. Infrastructure keeps a business running. Product changes what the business is able to do.
What I Actually Do
The businesses I work with are not short of technology. They are short of technology that fits how they already work. There is usually a CRM nobody fills in properly, a process that lives in one person’s head, and a spreadsheet doing something load-bearing.
The work is mostly this: find the step the business is waiting on, replace it with something faster to use than the workaround, and make sure it still runs next year. Sometimes that is a system. Often it is deleting three of them.
Outside This
I played table tennis at regional level at Navodaya, and still play. Badminton too, at no standard worth quoting. Otherwise: trekking, in Georgia and around Manali, and camping on the coast here in the winter, mostly Fujairah and Umm Al Quwain.