Hemant Khandelwal holds the position of Senior Vice President of Product Development at Amagi Labs R&D. Amagi’s primary mission revolves around connecting the ever-expanding content creation industry with the emerging distribution platforms of the future. Hemant is at the forefront of this mission, leading efforts to manage channel creation and distribution across a diverse range of platforms, including cable, D2C apps, OTT, CTV, and FAST platforms. This responsibility includes overseeing the seamless operation of live sports and news channels and providing a unified self-service solution for creating, distributing, and monetizing FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV), linear, and Video-On-Demand streaming channels, complete with advanced analytics and monetization capabilities. Some of Amagi’s prominent clients include beIN Sports, Curiosity Stream, Discovery Channel, FOX Network Group, IMG, NBC Universal, Warner Media, Discovery Channel, and Tastemade.

Hemant led Harness at India in collaboration with Jyoti Bansal, the successful entrepreneur behind a $3.7 billion exit at AppDynamics. He established the India R&D center during Harness’s transition from stealth mode in early 2018, successfully expanding it to comprise a talented and high-performing team of around 250 professionals across engineering, product, customer success, and sales. Harness is valued at $3.7 billion during its last funding round.

He pioneered the introduction of the industry’s first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform, playing a crucial role in developing the core engineering components and successfully launching the next generation of CD products. He led the conception, development, and release of several innovative products entirely from the India R&D center. These included Cloud Cost Management, Internal Developer Portal, and DevSecOps, while also spearheading initiatives for Continuous Integration and Software Reliability Management.

To enhance scalability, he formed a platform engineering team and established a UI & QA council to standardize processes and solutions, enabling launch of new product development rapidly. He also initiated a developer effectiveness team aimed at driving substantial enhancements in developer productivity and schieved 20-80% gains across various domains, including streamlining deployment architectures and overseeing multiple microservices. This also set up the tone for creation of a new software engineering insights offering. For Product Led Growth, created a community engineering team to build a thriving Harness user community, contribute to open-source projects, and drive product activation and monetization efforts.

During his tenure as CTO of Rivigo, Hemant played a crucial role in transforming the company into a unicorn within three years. He oversaw the development of an intelligent and data-driven tech platform, hiring over 100 high-performing teams from scratch. Hemant’s contributions include designing innovative technologies such as network relay models, fuel analytics, resource allocation and optimization, human behavior analysis, and time continuum algorithms, resulting in three filed patents..

Previously, Hemant served as the engineering head at Adobe Systems, where he spearheaded engineering, product management, and technical support for the successful ColdFusion product line. He led the creation of proposals for groundbreaking innovations such as an API management platform, mobile application development platform, and cloud versions. Hemant also played a key role in establishing a secure eBook product in India and developing improved security infrastructure.

At Pramati Technologies, Hemant’s notable achievements include independently developing the world’s first EJB2.0 container, positioning the company ahead of major competitors in the Java enterprise space like Weblogic, Oracle and IBM. As an expert group member of enterprise Java standards, he contributed to defining the future direction and standards for Java usage in enterprises – EJB 3.0 and J2EE 1.4 alongside world’s topmost Java experts.

Hemant holds a graduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and an executive MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. His accomplishments extend beyond technical expertise, as he has also mentored managers, served as an Adobe ambassador, co-authored a book, and presented innovative ideas at Adobe and global conferences.

Reach him via twitter at @khandelwalh or hemant-at-crunchyfriday-dot-com.