End of an Era…… @Orbitz @OrbitzIndia
Wow what a ride it has been. Both for myself and for the company. I started working in the Chicago office in 2005 Feb as a Sr Software Engineer. I started off with the Dynamic packaging team and helped build out great features and new package combinations using some amazing technologies and archirectures. I can’t believe that we had used EJB’s in our booking engines :-) at that time. Within few months then arrived our great Technology build out effort and spanned across multiple years. During those days I spent quite some time building out Activities(Attractions and Services) products and launching partners such as Disney. Then came time to spend with Hotels and our web layer within our new technology platform. During our initial reorg I started working with our reviews based hotel search. Solr/Lucene and all the cool technologies were introduced to our stack by our team in early 2008. It turned out to be a great launch and during these times are when I got to know our Orbitz CPO and then the Product strategist.
After the decision to not continue with our labs site I then led the core business layer team which had some great developers and engineers. It was a time where we moved from horizontal to vertical to not so vertical organization. During this phase of early 2009 I also got involved in our Agile in the Large rollout, Became one of the key people who pushed for and evangelized and rolled out of the AIL within our entire organization. It was fun as we had been using agile in multiple smaller teams since 2006 and to really roll it out across all the teams didn’t come very easy but in the end the results were fantastic. During 2009 came our next reorg where in I chose the work on Air and the next 1.5 years it was a roller coaster. According to me Air is probably the most complex product within the travel space. The combination of airline business complexities, older technologies among GDS and airlines it always keeps us on our toes. To top this off during that time we probably had around 2 or 3 major airline mergers which caused us more headaches. During this time we also had some really cool technology buildout within our air space.
Mid 2010 was another turning point in my career as I chose to move out of technology/app development space into Data space. This was the early days of us using Hadoop and other cool ML technologies. I joined as the BI leader to head our Web Analytics and Data infrastructure space. My involvement in using Hadoop to build out our EDW infrastructure and to leverage data for analytics in the space of Marketing, CRM, Finance and other site optimization space was very rewarding and satisfying. The rollout of our Data Infrastructure build out and the outcomes were great.
Early 2012 was another turning point in my career. I decided to move back to India and during these days were also talks of opening an Orbitz office outside US. It worked out in a way for both Orbitz and I that we started an office in Bangalore India. The early days were very stressful as during the day I was working towards the whole nine yards of setting up the office (space, registration, bank, finance, accounting, HR etc..) and during nights would continue to work with my teams in Chicago which I was still managing. The next 10 months gave me an opportunity to understand in detail what it really takes to run an office in India and got me exposed to functions such as Finance, Accounting, HR, Payroll, recruiting, Tax, Audit, facilities, vendors, procurement etc… Its not every day you get an opportunity such as this so I was very thankful for it. Early 2013 we were all setup and ready to hire. I was initially able to build a good team of developers and started working with them to help support our international brands. Slowly success led to build out of other teams. After almost a year we hired some really fantastic leaders within the India office and of course HR. For me spending time with both Data and non data teams and helping build a great culture was a good challenge and in the end we all worked together to successfully build a great team and a fantastic office. I owe the success of this office to the Orbitz india leadership team, CTO and other leaders from Chicago. All in all every single employee from the Bangalore office worked towards the success and got involved in every aspect of the office be it culture, hiring, facilities or any other matter. Few of the activities which we all are very proud of and also participate and have fun are Biking outings, Board game nights, CSR activities, Foosball, Xbox, College recruiting, Pot lucks and of course the latest edition “Poker Nights” :-). We also had some really good speakers come over for our hosted Analytics Thursday or other Light House talks which focuses on technology related or any general interesting topics.
As all good things come to a turning point. We are waiting to see if things continue the same way or else maybe things get better. Only time will tell.
This is to wishing all the folks good luck, give in your heart and the best will come out. I will also leave you with a good quote I came across long time ago.
“Sweat during Peace so you don’t Bleed in War” — Anonymous