Ashutosh Saxena

Senior Director, Head of Europe Engineering

Shippo

Jan 2022 - current

* Established up Shippo Ireland as their conduit to Europe; strategized and created frameworks with legal, finance, HR, Marketing, and PR, to build an employee base of 120 in three years * Managed a €8.5MM budget across engineering and European operations in 2022; established Shippo’s brand name as a business and an employer in Ireland * Responsible for developing, implementing, managing, and evaluating Shippo’s overall technology platform along with business growth in Europe * Owned Shippo Platform, one of two major Shippo products, that provides API for ecommerce partners like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, 3PLs, merchants, used by 6K accounts * Captained a distributed Platform engineering team spanning US and Europe, streamlining execution and turning around low morale to predictably deliver a series of compelling product releases * Evangelized an org-wide effort on unifying the Shippo Public API and Platform API, removing ambiguity and driving feature parity across direct merchants and platform users * Formed Shippo’s Developer Relations and Developer Experience programs to enable developer adoption, ease of development, and building a community and Shippo’s technology brand name

Director of Engineering and General Manager, Deem Ireland

Deem, Inc.

Mar 2019 - Jan 2022

* Moved from San Francisco to set up the European R&D innovation center, and hired a world class team to improve upon the efforts of hundreds of top-notch Silicon Valley engineers over 2 decades * Incorporated Deem in Dublin. Strategically found and set up an engineering office. Established legal, accounting, and recruiting processes, and working culture and cohesion among US, India, and Europe * Responsible for executive strategy for all operations in Ireland and a budget of €15 million * Grew the engineering organization from 0 to 30 within 6 months, consisting of hiring managers, engineers, scrum masters, product managers, designers, from Europe, US, and India * Scaled the organization to 80 in 2 years, including 30 engineers in Spain, Belarus, and Thailand * Successfully filed for Irish government’s R&D grants, saving €2.5 million each year * Led the Tech Modernization initiative: architected, designed, and implemented new capabilities and feature parity with performance improvements, moving from a legacy to a modernized platform. Re-architected Deem’s monolithic travel platform into microservices while delivering new capabilities * Fostered a modern, agile, software development process, cultivating a left-shift mindset encompassing test driven development, automated deployments, shipping every day. Established product roadmaps, scrum and documentation processes, DevOps and InfoSec policies * Managed several engineering teams, accountable for their successes, providing coaching, mentorship and support to achieve delivery goals and develop career progression

Engineering Manager, Deem San Francisco

Deem, Inc.

Aug 2015 - Mar 2019

* Led and managed the architecture, design, and development to deliver software for Deem’s Open Expense platform, integrating with partners like Chrome River, Infor, and Workday * Author of Deem Alliance Open API, which allows partners to integrate with Deem Travel; partnered with Business Development and Customer Success teams to evangelize use of Open API * Spearheaded a process of 2-week release cycles in an otherwise monolithic world of 6-week releases * Doubled up as Product Manager, working with customers and partners and feeding into the product * Owned full stack development for core features, and external provider integrations for Deem Expense * Designed and built Expense REST API, database, backend, and frontend services, hybrid mobile app

Principal Software Engineer, Deem San Francisco

Deem, Inc.

Jan 2010 - Aug 2015

* Architected Deem’s Expense solution, introduced and created a microservices architecture in a pre-Docker, pre-Kubernetes era, contrasting the existing monolith * Designed FreePaaS–a homegrown deployment system predating Kubernetes that enabled CD * Developed the API, web, and UI; authored RCYUI, a Javascript platform framework used across Deem