Sankaranarayanan Viswanathan
Engineering leader · AI transformation consultant · Scientific visualization builder
Now
Independent AI transformation consultant since August 2025. My current specialization is AI-assisted software development — helping startups and engineering teams adopt AI coding agents to measurably improve delivery speed, productivity, and quality. The advice comes from hands-on practice: as a single engineer directing coding agents, I have built production systems spanning backend, web, mobile, and cloud — hundreds of thousands of lines of tested code within a year. I train developers, product managers, and leaders on coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Google Gemini), define AI-native engineering practices, and advise on trust calibration and responsible adoption. I publish these practices as Sarathi, an open-source workflow for coding agents.
Career
Ola Electric
Led a 130+ engineer organization across cloud platform (data stores, orchestration, CI/CD, streaming) and applications (online purchase, mobile apps, telematics, OTA, analytics). Scaled the backend 20x to 900k+ vehicles and 18B+ events/day at sub-10ms latency. Cut per-vehicle cloud infrastructure cost 20x. Delivered three major MoveOS releases; led migrations across public clouds into Ola Krutrim private cloud.
SanDisk / Western Digital
Led an 80-person global team building lights-out workflow automation for flash-storage qualification across 50,000+ nodes worldwide. Delivered a 25x productivity gain, 30% faster validation cycles, and multi-million-dollar savings. Employee-nominated Best Manager Award, Women's Day 2018.
Motorola / Motorola Mobility / ARRIS
Built and scaled teams across digital video and telecom over 19 years, rising from software engineer to senior engineering manager. Controller products (DAC6000, CASMR100) at Verizon, Comcast, Charter, Cox, and Shaw — 50M+ set-top boxes in production. Earlier work on Iridium satellite network management, CDMA/UMTS call-trace re-architecture, iDEN push-to-talk, and soft-switch provisioning.
Education & publication
- MBA, Finance — IIM Bangalore (2004–2007), 6th in class. Exchange semester at ESSEC Business School, France.
- MTech, Computer Science — IIT Bombay (1995–1997), 2nd in class.
- BTech, Computer Science — University of Calicut (1990–1994), 1st in university.
- Dynamic currency determination in optimized programs, ACM TOPLAS, Nov 1998 (with D. M. Dhamdhere).
Outside work
I code for fun. My astronomy visualizations power public lectures and outreach — most recently a unified portal for 40+ lunar missions, a real-time Artemis II flyby tracker, tools for satellite conjunction analysis and planetary alignments, and a research guide to how eclipses, occultations and transits are computed. I've given talks at the Bangalore Astronomical Society, RV University, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, and Jain College; slides here. I also shot and co-produced the indie short film Antahkaran (2015).
How I lead
Strategic thinking, technical depth, and operational diligence, paired with empathy, transparency, and empowerment. Consistently recognized in 360° feedback and employee-nominated awards as one of the best managers colleagues have worked with.