SHARMILEE PATEL

In December 2023, ResearchGate faced operational issues that resulted in the layoff of 40% of its workforce, including the entire team I was part of. During this period, I chose to take time off to recharge and gain new experiences. I traveled extensively throughout Brazil and other parts of South America, which enriched my perspective and fueled my creativity. 

Current Endeavors

Since then, I have been actively engaged in several productive activities:

• Fyntra: I am working on a mobile application for Fyntra using Flutter as a personal project that focuses on financial literacy for women.
• Mentorship: Through MentorCruise, I mentor aspiring developers, helping them grow their technical and professional skills.
• Language Skills: I am sharpening my German speaking skills, which enhances my ability to work in diverse, international environments.
• Creative Pursuits: Writing and filmmaking have become significant outlets for my creativity, allowing me to approach problem-solving and cross-functional collaboration with a fresh, innovative mindset.

At ResearchGate, I built a sustainable cross-functional team from scratch for the Growth vertical with six full-stack engineers and two backend engineer. As Engineering Manager, I am responsible for the team's delivery and people management, with hands-on responsibility for 60-40%.

TechStack: React, Kotlin, Swift, Typescript, PHP, GCP, Jenkins, Azkaban, Tableau, GitHub, MongoDB, RabbitMQ

• Tech Leadership:  Provide technical guidance and leadership to the team to navigate through complex projects, fostering a culture of innovation, learning, and excellence. For example, Empower and enable the team to inherit a legacy mobile codebase (1.5 years untouched) to develop an Android app, ship it to the Android market by the end of the year, and update the existing iOS app.
• Strategic Planning: Define and execute a tech strategy, setting clear goals and objectives to drive business growth and user engagement.  
• Communication: Effectively communicate the tech strategy, progress, and outcomes to senior management and cross-functional teams.
• Delivery Management: Planned and executed complex software development projects, ensuring on-time delivery of high-quality releases with sprint planning, product-tech refinement, and release management.  - For example, Publication recommendation feature, Launch Android App to market.
• YBIRI: Implemented CI/CD with Jenkins and Github actions and optimized it for a smoother and faster release process using composite actions.  
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Add experimentation capabilities to the product to enable product teams to make data-driven decisions, such as publication recommendations or saved Lists. 
• Process Improvement:  I maximized team efficiency and effectiveness by continuously evaluating and enhancing engineering processes and practices. For example, I improved delivery pipeline time by 20% by adding technical refinement and speeding up the code review process.  
• Stakeholder Management: Collaborate closely with product management, design, and other stakeholders to align engineering initiatives with business objectives and user needs. For example, Productively managing technical debt while progressing on Team OKRs.
• Hiring and Onboarding: Recruit top engineering talent to build a high-performing and collaborative team. I developed onboarding processes to enable faster onboarding of engineers to the team.
• Team Engagement: Foster a culture of ownership, autonomy, collaboration, and inclusivity within the team. Our team engagement score in quarterly engagement surveys is 5/5.
• Performance Management: Conduct thorough performance reviews, set clear and achievable goals, and provide constructive feedback to enhance team members' development with weekly 1:1 meetings and development talks. 

As part of the consumer experience team at P7S1, I led a team of five full-stack engineers on an interactive TV show project for their seven-channel apps.
TechStack: React, AWS SNS, AWS Lambda, Kotlin, Swift, Node.js, AWS, Azure, TypeScript, Kubenetes

• Implemented interactive user experience for digital extension of TV shows such as The Masked Singer, Big Brother, and Eurovision Song Contest with user engagement features like in-app voting, guessing who is behind the masks, and comments. The Masked Singer season -2 is the first show where more than 1M audience per episode directly participated in voting for the show's winner with the app.
• Established and executed strategy for multi-product, multi-platform architecture for mobile, web, and TV teams, including white labeling of components and design system to achieve scalability and faster delivery of interactive TV show products for each TV show.  
• Improved application performance by 15% by migrating component-based features to function-based with the help of react-native hooks.
• Increased voting percentage by 20% by implementing AWS lambda function to auto-send AWS SNS notifications to mobile app users when voting starts.
• Developed Smyle app using Flutter that focuses on curated comedy content. 
• Implemented CI/CD with Azure and Bitrise. 
• I mentored the team in developing Android skills, helped create a Flutter community within the company, and trained the team in cross-platform development with Flutter.
• Hiring Android Engineers/ Flutter engineers for the team and onboarding them into the team.
• Helped team drive best coding and code review practices and decide architecture changes.
  Work closely with the product management and cross-functional teams to align technology solutions with the product vision.
• Mentored 2 Junior engineers and one senior engineer to nurture technical as well as personal skills and help them on their career path.

At Travian Games, I was introduced to the Gaming industry. I was responsible for the end-to-end development and shipping of their Android App for a multiplayer MMORG strategy game called Travian Kingdoms. I also had the opportunity to explore Firebase, React-Native, Android NDK, and CI.

As a Senior Mobile Developer, I have major accomplishments with the Travian Kingdoms Mobile App.

• Developed expertise in react-native and Implemented the In-app player chat in react-native.
• Implemented Game Map Module in C++
• Implemented auto-publishing Android apps to Google Play with Fastlane.
• Increased user engagement by 25% with the help of Firebase push notifications for game-related activities, like if their village has been attacked or their resources are full.

Clarice Technologies from Pune was acquired by Globant in 2015. As part of different mobile projects, I was exposed to cutting-edge mobile technologies like NFC, BTLE, Augmented Reality, IoT, and Android Wear Development.
As a Software Engineer, I played the following role with team members to build the next
generation of mobile and IoT-based applications:

• Improved network communication performance between Zigbee devices and mobile applications by 5% with the help of network queue implementation.
• Upgraded the User Experience of employees interaction mobile app (StarMeUp) with Material Design.
• Developed a custom UI component with a Hexagonal Grid algorithm.
• Built an app to connect the mobile device with Near Field Transmitter to charge the devices over wifi.
• Mentored junior engineers to nurture technical as well as personal skills.

At ISPL, I was introduced to Android Development. I explored different kinds of libraries, APIs, Google Services, Augmented Reality, Mobile Database, etc.

Following are the key highlights of my role in different mobile projects.

• Developed an algorithm to draw custom routes on Google Maps for Sewage Maintainance Project.
• Developed the Map Library consisting of location fetching, address geocoding, direction step parsing, marker rotation as per route, and route drawing on the map.

Leadership Principles at Harvard Business School Online

Bachelor Of Engineering (Information Technology) 
Dharmsinh Desai Institute of Technology