After 15.8 years at AWS and a total of almost 22 years in the search industry, I am taking a break from corporate world to pursue my other interests. March 31st, 2026 will be my last day at Amazon!
I have immense sense of gratitude to the opportunities I received and very proud of what we have built. Extremely thankful to lot of leaders, peers, and friends who have worked with me through this journey.
Building a search engine straight out of college in a startup(IsoftTech/StataLabs), DesktopSearch and web scale multi media search systems at Yahoo!, and then massive, multi billion AWS search service (CloudSearch, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch) at Amazon are something which I will cherish forever.
Achieving all of these at that scale, being in India all those years was quite fulfilling and I am very grateful to the people who partnered and the leaders who trusted me to have this kind of an impact remotely with large organisations across geographies.
I will remember several strategical work and deep dives in search, log analytics, vectors, AI, scale, resiliency, availability, and durability etc. There were several key milestones like scaling the single cluster to petabytes, supporting millions of hosts under Managment, adding vector support in OpenSearch, launching Serverless, adding remote storage, ML initiatives, semantic search, zero trust security, and integrations with several other services to call out a few.
The growth of the service has challenged the limits of several other dependent platform services(storage, compute and network) and it resulted in we collectively making the whole AWS a better place for our customers.
More interesting lessons were in dealing with challenges of starting as a first engineer in AWS in India and scaling it to few hundred people, dealing with time zones, operational scars, customer obsession, building awesome product features, and growing both the business and people’s careers.
For those of you who are curious about what next, I want to experience a slow life by spending more time on farming, family and travel. This was not easy decision, but something which I have contemplated for years. Will see how this early retirement goes and hope I don’t get bored!
I also hope to spend time writing about my journey, full cycles from farming to engineering to farming. I have my roots in agriculture, prior to me doing engineering in computer science. Collectively over the last three decades, there were many interesting incidents, stories, lessons, both technical and philosophical which might be inspiring to many. That is a wealth of experience to carry into an independent strategic advisory 🤗
