About

Udaya Kiran is an accomplished engineering and product leader with over 10 years of experience in building and scaling high-performing teams and user-obsessed products. He currently leads the Discover Surfaces and Proactive App Content Teams at Google, where he helps over 1 billion users discover information and build knowledge using their mobile devices. Prior to his role at Google, Udaya was the head of engineering and products for one of the three business units of Media.net. He was also the founding tech leader for Alexa India Experiences Team at Amazon and the engineering head for Learnexa, an e-learning cloud startup. Udaya has led cross-functional organizations of up to 135+ members in India, Europe, and UAE. He has set up and scaled three engineering sites from the ground up and has handled stakeholders including senior leaders of large companies and CXOs of unicorns. He has nurtured multiple senior leaders, first-line managers, and ICs to create empathy-driven, sustainable, and performance-focused tech organizations. With a demonstrated history of owning vision, research, product roadmap, analytics, user engagement, stakeholder management, and P&L for various internet products, Udaya has created multiple new business areas for companies by thinking big, innovating, and leading teams through transition. He has also led PM and Design teams of size 12+. Udaya's areas of interest include consumer internet, large-scale distributed systems, concurrent systems based on XMPP, machine learning, data platforms, ambient computing, SaaS, web/mweb, multimedia (streaming, transcoding), and operational tooling. He is currently the Sr. Director of Engineering & Product for Strategic Initiatives at Media.net and has previously held positions at Amazon and Snapdeal as a Manager of Alexa Experiences and Engineering Manager II, respectively. Udaya holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from Vellore Institute of Technology and completed his Intermediate (class XI & XII) in Maths, Physics & Chemistry from Sapthagiri Jr. College. His tech stack includes dotNET, product manager, Web, Senior Software Engineer, Mobile, ML, and Research Scientist.