About
Gayathri Sukumar
I lead platform engineering for data, ML and generative AI. Most of my work comes down to one question: what has to be true for an AI system to be trusted in production — and who builds that, so every product team doesn’t have to solve it again.
How I work
I care about the unglamorous parts, because they decide whether an AI programme survives contact with production: evaluation you can gate a release on, observability that explains a regression, interfaces that let a platform change underneath its consumers, and an honest account of what has not been verified.
I have also spent most of my career building teams rather than only systems — an organisation founded from nothing and grown past forty, orgs of eighty-plus, twenty-odd promotions. The two are the same job: both are about making the right thing the easy thing.
And I still write code. This site and the projects on it are hand-built, partly because taste in systems decays when you stop, and partly because the fastest way to have a real opinion about agentic tooling is to use it on something that matters to you.
Experience
Twenty years, five companies.
- 2024 – now
Senior Director, Data, ML & GenAI Platform · GoDaddy
- Define and lead the company-wide GenAI platform architecture and strategy, powering LLM-based and agentic systems for customer-facing products and internal platforms alike.
- Built and scaled distributed LLM infrastructure: RAG pipelines, long- and short-term agent memory, context orchestration, personalisation.
- A unified agent platform — SDK, runtime and UX layer — for production agents and multi-agent workflows, with MCP-based connectors standardising how they reach enterprise systems.
- Established the evaluation, observability and instrumentation frameworks that make agent behaviour measurable and governable at scale.
- Earlier in the role, led data platform and ML systems: large-scale pipelines, feature infrastructure, production ML.
- 2014 – 2024
Senior Manager, Engineering & Science · Amazon, Seattle
- Latterly senior technical owner for LLM initiatives across Amazon Smart Vehicles — car control, personal mobility and navigation, automotive services including EV charging.
- Founded the Automated Brand Protection organisation from inception and grew it past 40 people, defining its vision, charter and structure; led engineering orgs of 80+ across SDEs, TPMs, applied scientists, language engineers and managers.
- Designed and delivered a rule engine running 10,000 transactions per second against 50,000+ rules, and an Elasticsearch index spanning 10 billion catalog items across 16 countries.
- Built and scaled Brand Registry and Project Zero; cut rule-engine cost fivefold with zero downtime by moving it onto AWS Elasticsearch — patent filed.
- Launched visual image search for trademark infringement: 3 million new images a day, 100,000+ logos, 99% precision at 1,500 images per second.
- Shipped across 13+ locales and 20 languages; led programme increment planning across Seattle, Phoenix, New York and London.
- Promoted 20+ people across disciplines and groomed three senior-manager candidates.
- 2011 – 2014
Software Development Manager · Expedia, Bellevue
- Owned all backend systems for Vacation Packages — shopping, pricing, booking, reporting, analytics — across four teams.
- Architected a rule-based pricing engine to replace a rigid legacy system, and moved the data tier onto MongoDB and Hadoop.
- Took the release cycle from three months to three weeks.
- 2005 – 2011
Software Engineer · Microsoft, Redmond
- Subscription and commerce platform; Bing Rewards and advertising.
- 2004 – 2005
Software Engineer · ANTLabs, Singapore
Education
- 2023
Executive MBA · University of Washington, Seattle
- 2004
Bachelor of Computing, Computer Science · National University of Singapore
SIA-NOL Scholar
Recognition & community
- Patent filed — rule-engine cost optimisation on AWS Elasticsearch
- Innovation Fest, Amazon Marketplace — innovative product, 2016 and 2017
- Innovation Fest — panellist and organiser, 2017
- Amazon Women in Engineering — leadership team, 2014–2017
- Girls Who Code — committee organiser, 2016
Contact
Greater Seattle.