About

Gaurav Kumar is a seasoned Senior Principal Big Data Engineer with over 10 years of experience in building large scale distributed systems for data-driven applications. He has worked on some of the most challenging problems in online travel, telecom, and media domains, making him an expert in his field. Currently, he is associated with MakeMyTrip, where he has been instrumental in putting the 'My' back in MakeMyTrip. Gaurav is a problem solver at heart and has directly led teams of 8+ people on various projects focusing on customer segmentation, personalization, and context-aware mobile experiences. He has a proven track record of building highly performant real-time Big Data systems handling terabytes of data. His key achievements include improving customer experience and CTR by creating personalized intent-driven mobile experiences, building an organization-wide customer segmentation & targeting platform to create a 360-degree view by aggregating data across all platforms and sources, and building a persuasion engine by combining batch & real-time insights mined from data, among others. In the past, Gaurav has worked at IBM, where he set up Hadoop clusters of Sprint with 200+ nodes storing 100+ terabytes of data. He has also worked on the most visited news website in UAE- GulfNews.com by setting up their search engine to serve over a million page views daily. He is also the technical reviewer of the book ‘Learning Big Data with Amazon Elastic MapReduce’ published by Packt. Gaurav is proficient in various Big Data technologies such as Spark, Spark Streaming, Hive, Kafka, Hadoop, Akka HTTP, Presto, Oozie, Flume, Sqoop, Kibana, Airflow, among others. He is also well-versed in languages such as Scala, Java, Python, Shell Scripting, JavaScript, TypeScript, React.js, React Native, and has expertise in cloud technologies such as Cloudera CDH, AWS, S3, EMR, Glue, Athena, Redshift, Kinesis, RDS, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP, DynamoDB. Gaurav holds a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) degree from Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology and a Higher School Certificate from Kulachi Hansraj Model School. He is a data scientist with expertise in NLP, Search, and infra. He has experience working with XGBoost, Apache Airflow, Amazon Athena, Scikit, MapReduce, Redis