About

Nishant Asthana is a seasoned engineering leader and entrepreneur with over 20 years of hands-on engineering experience and more than 8 years of experience building and managing high-performance full-stack engineering teams. He is currently leading an engineering team at Alexa Shopping at Amazon, working on some of the most ambiguous spaces in voice Q&A. Prior to Amazon, Nishant worked at Uber where he led multiple teams delivering impactful initiatives. He also started his own startup, Mentr, where he built a business around peer-to-peer mentoring. Before Mentr, he worked for eBay in various leadership and individual contributor capacities, managing ICs and managers encompassing backend, frontend, big data, and machine learning engineers. Nishant has a proven track record of leading multiple engineering teams of individual contributors and managers, converting struggling teams to high-performing teams that deliver impact, and creating a long-term vision and getting cross-functional alignment to execute on it. He is an expert in communicating, aligning, and collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders. Nishant is proficient in cutting-edge technologies such as microservices, REST, RPC, Go, ElasticSearch, Java, Python, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, Hive, HDFS, Spark, NodeJS, React, containers, and DevOps. He has real-world entrepreneurship experience owing to founding multiple companies and products. Currently, Nishant is leading teams focused on product question answering for media, consumer electronics, and smart home products. His team's vision is that Alexa will be the world's most knowledgeable product expert who knows you, in a store that sells everything. Nishant's relevant experience is 24.53 years, and he is always working with the latest and greatest technologies. He is a data scientist, a product manager, and a senior software engineer all in one.