Akhil Mantripragada
New Ventures Tech Lead @ Toast | 2x Founder | Software Engineer
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Overview
Work Experience
Engineering Leader - New Ventures - Ads/Insights
2023 - Current
- Leading the 15-member engineering team for New Ventures Ads & Insights - Built three scaling products including Benchmarking (https://pos.toasttab.com/products/benchmarking)
Toast is a point-of-sale and restaurant management platform designed for businesses in the food service and hospitality industry.
Raised $961,950,000.00 from 12 West Capital.
Software Architect & Engineering Leader
2016 - 2023
Pragya Systems builds Higher Education technology that unlocks campus silos and facilitates the flow of information for students, faculty, administrators, and employers. The technology enhances student success and eases the transition from college to a career • Led the integration of Edulinc (my acquired startup) with Pragya’s existing application • Conceptualized, designed, and led the development of an IBM-Watson powered machine learning-based algorithm that tags college data with careers, a course planning tool for students, and an adaptive learning management platform • Designed, developed, and launched a student dashboard that connects multiple data silos at an Institution. Spearheaded the collaboration by engaging the institution’s CIO and stakeholder teams to gather, analyze and streamline data • Launched six products at over 10 institutions • Managed multiple engagements as the customer-facing technical lead to prioritize feature backlog and gather customer requirements; Maintained scrum artifacts and worked with junior engineers to establish definitions of done • Worked with the design team to prototype and build UXs, collaborated with the marketing team to define KPIs and built mechanisms to capture relevant data, and worked with leadership to define and execute go-to-market strategies • Managed 4 engineers (remote - multi-region team); Implemented processes to improve development team efficiency (Improved efficiency of the engineering team by over 30%); Mentored new hires and developed onboarding processes
Co-Founder - Engineering and Product
2014 - 2020
Acquired by Pragya Systems Corp. in 2016 Edulinc is an organization and collaboration tool for students and instructors. Edulinc integrates with Dropbox, GitHub and LMS to bring all relevant resources to one place and make collaboration among students and instructors more efficient. • Built and led a team of 3 developers and 1 designer. Managed dependencies, prioritized feature set and allotted tasks to achieve maximum efficiency • Designed and implemented Edulinc’s core features (including integrations with Dropbox, Github and a payment/subscription module built using Stripe). Developed and documented APIs for students to continue developing other features for Edulinc • Spearheaded conversations with Provosts, Deans and Department Chairs of universities to deploy Edulinc at 3 universities • Led the team through two pivots, and devised strategies to capture relevant feedback
Co-Founder - Engineering and Product
2013 - 2014
• Sold the product to UTSA; used the funds to go to grad school at Columbia University • Built and led a team of 2 developers and 1 designer (Remote team) • Gathered requirements for the Quantitative Literacy Course Data Submission(QLCDS) web portal from over 25 different instructors/program coordinators and translated them into easy-to-use features to cater to instructors from diverse backgrounds • Designed, implemented, and deployed the QLCDS web portal to capture student data efficiently; QLCDS is now being used by over 150 professors for 75 courses at UTSA and has reduced workload by more than 75%
Web Engineer
2012 - 2014
Quantitative Literacy Program • Reported directly to the Director of QLP • Parsed and analyzed datasets collected by QLP. • Maintained QLP website (qlp.utsa.edu) • Designed and implemented a content management system to manage the department website
Research Assistant: Cloud and Big Data Laboratory/Open Compute
2013 - 2014
• Pioneering laboratory in US; Researched under the supervision of Rackspace’s Vice President • Performed Cloud hardware certification • Collaborated with industry experts from Rackspace, Avnet, Ubuntu and Facebook • Only undergraduate student to be selected in a group of post-doctorates and industry experts • Designed and Developed OCP Website
DPAA Software Developer
2012 - 2013
• Designed, developed and implemented the DPAA prototype, a web portal that allows students to plan their courses at UTSA by providing them suggestions based on their major, GPA and interests. One of the first student made software. • The DPAA prototype was later be scaled to accommodate the 30,000 UTSA Student population • Reported directly to the CIO and Vice-Provost of UTSA.
Tutor
2011 - 2013
Tutoring Services • Tutored over 250 students in Algebra, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus I. • Successfully formulated new tutoring techniques including "student-tutor role reversal" and "One Day Tutor" that increased student reach and concepts understanding.
Recitation Presenter/Teaching Assistant
2011 - 2012
Computer Science Department - Worked for Dr. Steve Robbins, Dr. Wenning Zhang and David Womack. - Presented Introduction to Programming II and Data Structures as a sophomore (usually done by seniors or graduate students) - Conducted recitations and graded assignment for over 100 students.
Web Specialist and Digital Marketing Consultant
2013 - 2013
• Redesigned the website for Kinesis Pvt. Ltd. using the latest web technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Twitter Bootstrap • Established a social media campaign prototype for the company to build on. • Implemented the website using the best SEO techniques to increase the reach of Kinesis Tennis Coaching in Bangalore area.
Accounting Intern
2012 - 2012
• Determined "Cash Loss" across also Tesco stores in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia • Compared cash loss data of each country and derived mitigating efforts to reduce cash loss. • Reported directly to the Head of Accounting at Tesco • Collaborated with managers from different teams at Finance/Accounting division at Tesco.