Hey there, I’m Vivek! 🤓
I’m a Product Manager at StarTree, where I lead product strategy for ingestion, AI, and application experiences on Apache Pinot — including the platform initiative to enable high-concurrency, low-latency query serving directly from Apache Iceberg. My work is centered on helping organizations power customer-facing analytics at scale.
About me 👋
Prior to StarTree, I spent six years at Hevo Data Inc in roles spanning Founding Engineer to Principal Product Manager. I was part of the team that built the core ETL, data warehousing, and data modeling platform from the ground up, and later led product across the full stack — launching one of the industry’s first reverse ETL products, devising a pricing strategy, driving enterprise readiness initiatives, and managing cross-functional teams. Earlier, I was a Software Engineer at Via.com, working on payments, fraud detection, and data infrastructure.
I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from NIT Durgapur, and have a published research paper in a Springer Journal on security strategies for Delay Tolerant Networks.
- I currently live in Bangalore, India 🇮🇳
- I try to become a better version of myself by reading non-fiction and experimenting with the learnings in my life.
- I’m also an avid trekker and traveler. I have solo traveled to almost all parts of India. Hitchhiking and meeting people from a different culture is something that I like the most. You can follow my travels on Instagram. The above view from 12500ft is the best view I’ve ever seen.
- I sometimes tweet on product management and life learnings.
- You can know more about my professional journey on LinkedIn
What I’m working on at StarTree 🚀
Here are some of the key projects I’m currently driving as Product Manager:
- Data Portal — A self-serve UI for Apache Pinot. I defined the product vision and led cross-functional execution (engineering, design, GTM) to accelerate trials and reduce sales cycle by 30%.
- Ingestion into Apache Pinot — Defined and executed the roadmap for streaming and file-based ingestion, implementing upsert, purge, and backfill strategies to enable full data lifecycle management across petabyte-scale workloads. Reduced ingestion errors by 45%.
- Query Analyzer using LLM Models — Driving the product strategy for intelligent query analysis, leveraging LLMs to surface optimization recommendations and reduce debugging time for engineers working with Apache Pinot.
- Reading data from Iceberg using Apache Pinot — Leading the platform initiative to enable high-concurrency, low-latency query serving directly from Apache Iceberg tables, unlocking new real-time analytics use cases for data lakehouse architectures.
What gets me out of bed in the morning 🌞
My favorite things to do are learning about this world, acquiring new skills, and making things. It’s an added bonus if I can do it with a community of like-minded people. A lot of time I hang out online with them on Lunchclub or Clubhouse.
Some of the things you can find me doing when I’m not building products:
- Experimenting with Coffee
- Sweating profusely in a CrossFit
- Cooking white sauce pasta or Indian
- DIY-ing beautiful things for my new home
- Reading books about product building, design, finance, psychology, philosophy, or extraordinary people
- Having long and weird conversations with friends
- Traveling to new places
- Attending hackathons or conferences
- Taking courses and learning new things
How I work 💪
I’m a huge believer in deep work. Nothing meaningful can be created without flow. All of my work practices are aimed towards maximizing deep work and minimizing any distractions (meetings, I’m looking at you 👀).
- I try to attend the least amount of meetings possible.
- I put a lot of effort into my written communication to minimize the need for synchronous meetings.
- I use a Pomodoro timer to help me stay focused on one task at a time.
- I spend a lot of time learning new things and increasing my efficiency, so I can accomplish more in less time.
- I don’t store a lot of data in my small head 😛 instead I use notebooks.
How to reach me 📫
- E-mail: I read my emails once a day. You should not feel obligated to read or respond to any of the emails you receive from me outside of your normal hours. You can reach out to me at wvsinha [at] gmail [dot] com
- By default, you should be able to schedule a 30 minute 1:1s with me as needed. I prefer that you schedule the meeting, just don’t make it too late.
Ask me about 💬
- Apache Pinot, real-time OLAP, and data lakehouse architectures ⚡
- Building data platforms and ETL pipelines at scale 📊
- Coffee ☕️
- Life, mountains, and philosophy ⽣
- Building a SaaS product from the ground up ⨳
My learnings 📕
- You can follow my bookshelves on goodreads.
- I follow a few blogs and newsletters, one of the bests is Timeless insights for life and business.
- I’m currently learning how to play guitar. 🎸
Mentorship
- I love mentoring. There are a handful of people who I’ve mentored in the past, you can find blogs on their experience written by Pavan Kalyan on his experience with Hevo, Pavan again and Shikhar Vaish on his first year as a Product Manager
Trivia ⏳
- Good music, a cup of coffee, and mountains make a nice combination, is what I believe in.
- Living in mountains for months do create stories, I have got a lot of them to tell. Some of them include my hitchhiking experience and escape from a near-death accident while traveling solo in the Himalayas. 🏔
- My pose in the above photo is me welcoming anything that the universe has for me.
- Music is attached to my soul. Led Zeppelin, Parvaaz or Pink Floyd always tops my Spotify year wrap.
- Political drama or thriller on Netflix is my guilty pleasure. I can binge straight for 10-12 hours. 📺
- I forget a lot of things 🤯 just kidding, I forgot an important day once.
- In an interview, I answered the name of my book would be “Zero to One in Life.” I think it was either quite geeky or cheesy. :P