Silicon Valley is a very unique phenomenon and if you live here for any length of time, you will surely have caught the entrepreneur bug – or at the very least wondered if you should be a part of the startup ecosystem.
Through various stages of my career, I have asked myself this question and often indulged in moonlighting with ambitious ideas, worked alongside budding founders, advised others – but due to one reason or other did not take the full plunge in myself.
All that changed, when I got the opportunity to be a part of Galileo.ai. It had just closed a Series B and the founders were looking to hire a VP of Engineering that can help scale the product and the product/engineering organization.
I have always loved that part of career where I can come in, build something from 0 to 1 and help scale organizations. While at DoorDash, I had helped start the Data Platform organization pre-IPO and was fortunate enough to scale it to a 100+ strength org with a vast scope. A similar opportunity at a actual real Series B startup was something I could not pass and Galileo.ai provided that. I remain thankful to all the 3 co founders – Vikram Chatterjee, Atin Sanyal and Yash Sheth who placed their faith in me and provided this opportunity.
Galileo.ai has since (as of May 2026) been acquired by Splunk/Cisco. It has been a thrilling ride to come in as a VPE and to play a significant role in helping shape and scale the company – and go through a successful acquisition. This journey exposed me to a lot of areas where I worked closely with my counterparts leading these areas – such as Sales, Marketing and Field Engineering. It was great exposure to how a scrappy startup works, how to operate in typical chaos a startup goes through, the ups and the downs, the urgent frantic hiring, the layoffs, the Board updates, the customer churns and the thrill of landing large customers and everything in-between.
I will share more in terms of what I learned and about this space of AI and Agent Observability/Evals engineering soon …
Engineering Leadership in the Data + AI Domain 