anishek agarwal
@anishekagarwal
Visionary technology leader with 20+ years of experience.
What I'm looking for
With over 20 years of experience in technology leadership, I have a proven track record of building and managing global engineering organizations across fintech, ad-tech, and analytics. My most recent role at Visa involved transforming the enterprise data and AI platform, where I successfully drove architectural strategies that resulted in significant cost savings of approximately $80 million over three years. My expertise in big data warehousing and distributed systems has been honed through leadership positions at Cloudera and Hortonworks, where I aligned technology strategies with business goals to foster innovation and scale high-performing teams.
As a Senior Director at Visa, I managed a 25-engineer organization and served as the Product Owner for Hive/Trino, overseeing the migration of SQL workloads to an open-source big data platform. I developed a GenAI SQL conversion tool that streamlined processes and improved productivity by 20%. My leadership style emphasizes mentorship and performance management, cultivating future leaders within my teams. I am passionate about driving technology initiatives that enhance productivity and innovation, and I thrive in environments that challenge me to push the boundaries of what's possible.
Experience
Work history, roles, and key accomplishments
Tech Advisor
Xiphi.ai
Feb 2025 - Present (5 months)
Helped Xiphi.ai as a technical advisor to build a knowledge platform for professionals, laying out the overall technical architecture strategy. Incorporated cutting-edge technologies like real-time conversational AI agents and Chat Agents with RAG/CAG implementations to provide exceptional user experience.
Senior Director, Data & AI Platform
Visa
Nov 2022 - Dec 2024 (2 years 1 month)
Managed and scaled a 25-engineer organization, serving as Product Owner for Hive/Trino and driving the technical delivery and strategic direction of petabyte-scale analytics solutions. Led the strategy and execution for migrating SQL engine workloads to an open-source big data platform, contributing to projected cost savings.
Director of Engineering
Soroco India Pvt Ltd
Apr 2022 - Nov 2022 (7 months)
Managed a team of 14 engineers to develop the core inferencing engine for a flagship process mining product, responsible for analyzing high-volume, noisy clickstream data. Architected a synthetic data generation solution to enable robust performance testing of this complex inferencing engine.
Senior Engineering Manager
Cloudera (Hortonworks)
Nov 2016 - Feb 2022 (5 years 3 months)
Managed multiple specialized engineering teams across India, Hungary, and the US, delivering core components of the Apache Hive data warehouse platform. Directed the development of enterprise-grade replication capabilities for Apache Hive, enabling both on-premises and cloud deployments.
Principal Data Engineer
Near Co
Dec 2014 - Nov 2016 (1 year 11 months)
Spearheaded the design and implementation of real-time user profiling pipelines, enabling brands to create hyper-local, customized audiences using Elastic Search and ML-based rules engines. Architected and delivered a high-throughput ingestion platform, capturing ad-tech event streams from Kafka into HDFS.
Lead Consultant Engineer
Thoughtworks India Pvt Ltd
Nov 2009 - Dec 2014 (5 years 1 month)
Spearheaded development of a flagship product for a global consulting firm, targeting CMOs of Fortune 1000 companies to help them make better marketing spend decisions. Delivered an intelligent workload orchestration platform on AWS EMR, dynamically optimizing resource allocation and reducing cloud infrastructure costs.
Senior Software Engineer
RSA
Nov 2006 - Nov 2009 (3 years)
Worked on SAML 2.0 implementation for the RSA Federated Identity Manager product. Took the product through Industry Interoperability Certification done by the Liberty Alliance group.
Software Engineer
Thoughtworks India Pvt Ltd
Jul 2004 - Nov 2006 (2 years 4 months)
Developed a Heavy Duty Equipment Leasing application for a leading US manufacturer, delivering an enterprise solution to streamline leasing operations. Built expertise in software development and stakeholder collaboration.
Education
Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework
PESIT, Bangalore
Bachelor of Engineering, Information Science
Grade: First Class
Completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Science, achieving First Class honors. The curriculum provided a strong foundation in information technology and engineering principles.
Tech stack
Software and tools used professionally
Availability
Location
Authorized to work in
Job categories
Skills
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