A life, not a résumé.

I was nineteen, at an Alexa Dev Day in Delhi, and I had never built anything anyone used. I went home and made a Game of Thrones quiz. It published a couple of days later and picked up around 220 people in five days, which at the time felt like a stadium.

Amazon was running a promotion: developers in the US, UK and Germany who crossed 100 or 75 users on a new skill got an Echo Dot. India was not on the list. So I wrote to Jeff: thanked him for Alexa, bragged about my 220 users, linked the quiz, and objected to being left out.

The line I would still write today: “Hopefully, this funny sort of ‘discrimination’ will be taken care of Jeff, so that we Indian Developers are not left behind the world.” I was nineteen and it reads like it. It also worked, and in October 2025, India Today, The Economic Times and News18 all ran the story.

I went full-time freelance on voice: 1,000+ voice apps across ten Amazon marketplaces, 400+ clients, and about 500 five-star reviews on Fiverr. I turned down a full-time job to keep doing it, which Amazon later wrote a blog post about.

I also founded the Alexa developer community in India: Alexa Delhi first, then Alexa Community India. I organised 37 workshops and meetups, finding venues, writing the material and teaching people to build for voice. The community grew to 3,200+ developers. Amazon named me Community Influencer of the Year in 2018 and Community Evangelist of the Year in 2019: the same award under a new name. I became an Alexa Champion in 2021.

I contracted for Zammo in the US and Vixen Labs in London at the same time. At Zammo, I built the conversational layer for Atlanta’s ATL311 service across web, app and phone, and flight information for Vancouver International Airport. At Vixen Labs, I worked on the Google Action for the Voice Consumer Index.

I joined Okta as the first solutions engineer in India, supporting customers across APAC, including India, Australia and New Zealand. Four people in the office when I started, about six hundred when I left, 802 days later. I counted.

Much of the work was about sign-in and connecting applications to Auth0. Customers also needed help deciding what someone could access after signing in, especially when a list of roles no longer captured their rules. I built OpenFGA sample applications to demonstrate those checks. For one Indonesian bank, I learned Flutter over a weekend and rebuilt its mobile UI against Auth0’s APIs so the team could try its familiar app with a different identity provider.

In college, ₹1 lakh a month felt like a sorted life. Freelancing eventually paid roughly ten times the jobs I was considering, so taking a job meant earning less. I took one anyway. I hadn’t bought a car or expensive watches, and most of my savings were in fixed deposits. Keeping my expenses low made that choice easier.

I started speaking about fine-grained authorization and what changes when an AI agent acts for a user. A role alone may not describe which records an agent should access for a particular task. Relationship-based permissions can help, but they do not make every permitted action safe.

NDC London in January was my first international talk. Civo Navigate in San Francisco followed the next week, then KubeCon India, NDC Copenhagen and Open Source Summit Korea. Five conference stages in one year. Sessionize put me in its top 3% of speakers by activity that year.

I’m a solutions engineer at DevRev in Bengaluru. I rebuilt Lotto’s CX support agent and delivered one8’s production launch: order lookup, tracking, returns, exchanges and cancellations, with a handover when a person needs to step in. By August 2026, around 80% of conversations were being resolved end to end without a human.

The work includes customer integrations, deployment and evaluating models for answer quality and cost. Permissions are part of that: an agent needs enough access to help a customer without getting access it does not need.

I have been to 36 countries across five continents, mostly alone and mostly with a backpack. I grew up on the Premier League, English cricket and British television, which is a strange inheritance for someone from Delhi and explains why three weeks in the UK and Ireland after NDC London felt like arriving rather than visiting.

On a birthday trip in February 2026 I climbed Acatenango in Guatemala and watched Fuego erupt across the saddle all night. A month after moving to Bangalore in 2023 I had emergency surgery and spent about six weeks recovering; later that September I was standing on the Great Wall, and a year later on a boat south of Bruny Island, 2,200 km from Antarctica.