Satwik Hebbar
Co-founder strivelabs.ai | Crafting an agent-native work platform | Aspiring to build in public
About
I am an engineering leader who enjoys the human side of product development - motivating the best out of engineers and aiming to delight customers - as much as I enjoy its engineering aspects - breaking down complex problems alongside the best engineers and iterating toward the finish line. I helped build a Big Data Management product with StoredIQ (acquired by IBM) as part of their core Systems Team on the first lap of my career. My second lap with Freshworks involved challenging how SaaS platforms are built for scale as well as delightful developer experiences. My 3rd lap is playing out alongside the disruptive forces of Generative AI, building startups and innovative platforms from scratch. I have been coached by the industry's brightest engineers very early in my career and enjoyed a lot of agency with my work for the most part. This coupled with my educational background shape me into who I am today. I have witnessed the trials and tribulations of the startup journey as an early developer at StoredIQ, learned to setup a team from scratch as part of their India Development Center, and appreciated the challenges of integration after an acquisition. At Freshworks, I witnessed the raw hyperscale of a fast-growing startup with 1000X traffic growth across 4 years, helped bring a Marketplace experience for all Freshworks products, and helped establish a Developer Relations practice to put Developer Experience at the forefront of the platform. My journey today continues as an entrepreneur, attempting to bridge the yesterday of SaaS with the tomorrow of Agentic Automation, as we aspire to build a platform that accelerates the development and scaling of agentic workflows.
Experience
Co-Founder
strivelabs.ai · Full-time
Bridging yesterday’s SaaS with tomorrow’s Agentic Automation—building platforms that accelerate the development and scaling of AI-driven workflows.
Head of Engineering
Mesh · Full-time
Technology, architecture, engineering best practices, and culture to help build our differentiated Performance Enablement solution for the trailblazing leaders of people and technology teams worldwide. Primarily focused on rapid iterations with quality as we simultaneously cater to our most demanding enterprise users while experimenting to build our niche in this challenging market. Maintaining the delicate balance between Build v Buy as we aim to stand out using Machine Learning, Analytics and Technology-based Coaching.
Senior Director Of Engineering
Doubling down on developer experience for a fast growing community, while building in enterprise grade scale and security for customers who rely heavily on the platform. We are also laying the foundations for generating growing revenue for our partner and developer ecosystem, while aspiring to expand the platform into a pure play, composable APaaS.
Director Of Engineering
Expand the platform to multiple Freshworks products and establish a Developer Relations program to cater to a growing community of global developers. Traffic to the platform grew by 5X in this period while we also reached the milestone of 1000 apps on our Marketplace.
Engineering Manager
Technical and people leadership for the Freshworks Developer Platform, where we enable developers to effortlessly create powerful applications that complement the Freshworks suite of products. As a maturing developer-facing platform, we focus on scale, reliability and developer experience besides building this as a PaaS for developers and continuously tackling technical debt to help onboard new Freshworks products faster. Traffic to the platform took off in this period as we learned to handle a rapid 200X growth in 2 years.
Lead Software Engineer - StoredIQ
As lead architect for the StoredIQ platform, I have collaborated with Product Management to deliver critical features to the market through the year. I have represented StoredIQ engineering at client conferences and in front of potential customers and partners. With our talented engineering team, we have delivered StoredIQ's Box migration story over multiple iterations. We have also developed plans to take StoredIQ to the next level of scale and supporting a hybrid deployment model, and have already completed prototypes for these.
Software Architect and Manager
Post-acquisition, I built the first IBM Software Lab team in Chennai for StoredIQ. This was a cross-functional team covering everything from UI, Application Development, Platform Engineering, QA and DevOps. For 3 years, we consistently delivered complete features with little reliance outside our team and became go-to experts for several product components. As a manager, I personally recruited this team of young, driven and talented engineers and we built a reputation as a high-performance, closely-knit team at IBM. I have ingrained a culture of prototyping and show-and-tell which helped bring our ideas to the global team and into the product roadmap. As an architect, I have deployed lean development practices and coached young engineers through design and code reviews . As an individual contributor, I have continued developing critical features for components I own and addressing high priority customer issues. I have also spoken for StoredIQ at annual IBM conferences.
Partner
As a founding partner at Pravritt, I setup the infrastructure for a development center, owned the accounts and assets of the business and recruited young, promising engineers. I exposed myself to the challenges of running a small business in India. We primarily worked for StoredIQ as consulting software developers. We owned key data processing components and connectors, established core platform services as the product pivoted to a federated, virtualized solution and built the product's reporting capabilities from scratch. The latter was critical to the StoredIQ demo that closed the IBM acquisition.
Education
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Master Of Technology, Computer Science, Computer Science
2002 - 2004