Hrishikesh Vedantam

Experience

Where I’ve worked.

  1. – Present

    Co-Founder & Product Lead Meridian Data Labs

    Hyderabad, India / Guelph, ON (remote)

    • Lead product strategy for Honeycomb, the company’s industrial IoT platform: market analysis, pricing and the V2 roadmap, reviewed weekly with leadership.
    • Mapped a utility’s operations into 15 AI use cases ranked by value and ease, and anchored the roadmap on one high-value win.
    • Ran engagements from discovery workshops to commercial terms, including RFI, RFP and GeM responses and a full defence bid with a compliance matrix and dependency plan. Built the pricing, business cases and scenario models behind bids across five clients.
    • Took Buzz AI from prototype to production at the Indian Navy and DRDO, embedded on-site at defence facilities, and secured MoD clearance for every deployment.
    • Hired and coached engineers, designers and commercial staff, and led the team’s adoption of AI tools across engineering, commercial and operations work.
  2. – Present

    Teaching Assistant University of Waterloo

    BET 405, Digital Leadership & Transformation

  3. – Mar 2024

    Techno-Commercial Manager, Asia Optiply

    Hyderabad, India

    • Led India market entry for a Dutch inventory and purchasing SaaS from zero: go-to-market, segmentation, positioning and pricing. Grew the team from 2 to 15 and built a US$100k ARR pipeline.
    • Built the business cases for expansion, including competitive analysis and pricing for new verticals, and reported recommendations to leadership in Amsterdam.
    • Ran discovery with client procurement and inventory teams, delivered Zoho and Odoo ERP integrations through go-live, built ops tooling in Retool, and managed pipeline in HubSpot.
  4. – Jan 2022

    Software Engineer Vassar Labs

    Hyderabad, India

    • Cut media-sync latency from 83,750 ms to 408 ms, a 200× improvement, by tracing N+1 queries and uncached API calls in New Relic, and documented the diagnosis for the team.
  5. – Dec 2021

    Teaching Assistant, Cloud Computing Coding Dojo

    Remote, part-time

    • Co-developed the GCP curriculum, led a live session on APIs and cloud integration, and wrote guides learners used after the course.
  6. – Jan 2021

    Software Architecture Intern Estatetial

    Markham, ON (remote)

    • Built the production backend for a real-estate platform: GraphQL and Node.js services, a JavaScript-to-TypeScript migration, Docker and Kubernetes. Ran two zero-downtime cloud migrations, planning cutover and stakeholder communication.
  7. – Aug 2020

    Cloud Deployment Intern Indian Institute of Technology

    Hyderabad, India

    • Deployed private cloud infrastructure on OpenStack with Ansible, and built software-defined networking for routing, segmentation and access control.
  8. – Jun 2019

    Academic Intern National University of Singapore

    Singapore

    • Built secure IoT applications on Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ESP32 and micro:bit boards talking to Microsoft Azure over CoAP, MQTT and HTTP.
  9. – Jul 2018

    Software Development Intern TrackIT Solutions

    Dubai, UAE

    • Trained in full-stack web development and the software development life cycle, from requirements through testing and deployment.

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