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10 heads of engineering
These ten heads of engineering have each held a Head of Engineering title at the companies named on their rows below. Readers can learn how engineering leaders build and scale teams, set technical direction, and balance delivery speed against reliability and cost.
Professionals to explore
01—10Ben Patterson
LinkedInExperience: Head of Engineering · Cypress.io
Head of Engineering at Cypress.io since 2026, and former Senior Director of Engineering (2025–2026) and Director of Engineering (2022–2025) at Cypress.io. Other former roles include Senior Director of Engineering at Lambent (2019–2022) and at Threat Stack, Inc (2019). His profile describes experience leading diverse engineering teams through a variety of growth stages.
Gaurav Garg
LinkedInExperience: Head of Engineering · Lila Sciences
Head of Engineering at Lila Sciences since 2026. Former roles include VP Engineering at Benchling (2023–2026), VP Engineering, Platform and Cloud at Workday (2020–2023) and Sr. Director, Platform & Infrastructure Engineering at Groupon (2017–2020). His profile describes building and operating large-scale eCommerce, big-data analytics SaaS products and cloud platforms, and leading large-scale public cloud migrations.
Kim Mawla
LinkedInExperience: Executive Director, Head of Engineering (DevSecOps Products) · Black Duck
Executive Director, Head of Engineering (DevSecOps Products) at Black Duck since 2024. Former roles include Executive Director of R&D, Application Security Products at Synopsys Inc (2020–2024), Chief Technology Officer at InfoIMAGE, Inc. (2012–2018) and Senior Director, Cloud Platforms at Citrix (2009–2011). The profile headline cites AI, SaaS and cybersecurity and removing friction between speed and security at scale.
Madhu Kavikondala
LinkedInExperience: Head of Engineering · Stripe
Former Head of Engineering at Stripe (2021–2022), and Head of Engineering - Bedrock Responsible AI - Trust & Safety, Guardrails, Ground Truth at Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2022. Other roles include Head of Engineering - Subscriptions Services at Amazon (2016–2020). The profile says Madhu leads Responsible AI engineering at AWS Bedrock, building content safety, guardrails and model evaluation infrastructure.
Mehdi Daneshpanah
LinkedInExperience: SVP, Head of Engineering · Cognichip
SVP, Head of Engineering at Cognichip since 2026. Former roles include Founding VP of Software at Cognichip (2024–2026) and Sr. Director of Engineering at KLA (2011–2024). His profile says he leads the development of AI-native platforms transforming how semiconductors are designed, and that he builds engineering teams and products at the intersection of AI and deep tech.
Mrinal Shukla
LinkedInExperience: Head of Engineering · SPREEAI
Head of Engineering at SPREEAI since 2026. Former roles include Head of ML Inference Serving Annapurna Labs at Amazon (2024–2025) and Tech Lead - Ecosystem Engineering Platform at Netflix (2016–2021). His profile says he owns all engineering and ML R&D at an AI-native virtual try-on platform, reporting to the CEO across four functions in five countries, and that inference COGS fell 65% after he took the function.
Pradip Thoke
LinkedInExperience: Head of Engineering · Enlyft
Head of Engineering at Enlyft since 2024. Former roles at Dream11 include VP - Data Engineering (2021–2024), AVP - Data Engineering (2020–2021) and Director - Data Engineering (2019–2020). His profile says that at Enlyft he heads engineering and leads the building of AI-native GTM intelligence products for global teams, with a role that spans scaling the Pune hub.
Ramesh Perumalsamy
LinkedInExperience: Head Of Engineering · PhonePe
Head Of Engineering at PhonePe since 2019. Former roles include Director of Engineering Senior Engineering Manager at ClearTax (2016–2019) and Engineering Manager Team Lead Senior Software Engineer at Flipkart (2011–2016). His profile says he is currently leading a 150+ engineering organization and describes his focus on product, platform and organizational scaling in financial services and e-commerce.
Venkat Uppala
LinkedInExperience: Head of Engineering - Insurance · OVERJET
Head of Engineering - Insurance at OVERJET since 2025. Former roles include Senior Director of Software Engineering at Highspot (2022–2025) and Director of Engineering at U.S. Bank (2021–2022). His profile describes him as an engineering leader who builds production AI, and its headline cites agentic AI, voice AI and vision AI in production and scaling applied AI products and engineering orgs.
Zaven Nahapetyan
LinkedInExperience: Head of Engineering, Anthropic Labs · Anthropic
Head of Engineering, Anthropic Labs at Anthropic since 2025. His profile says he leads Labs, Anthropic's moonshots team, collaborating closely with research to turn new model capabilities into products. Other roles include Member of Technical Staff (Manager) at OpenAI (2024–2025), Co-Founder at Niche (2021–2024) and Sr. Engineering Manager at Meta (2012–2021).
Choose the right perspective
Match the person's scope, such as a whole company's engineering team or a single product line, and the stage of company they worked at to the decision you face. If you need help in a specific technical area such as AI, security or data platforms, favor someone whose listed roles sit in that area.
Questions to take into the conversation
- 01How do you decide when to reorganize an engineering team as it grows?
- 02Which metrics do you use to judge engineering delivery and quality without slowing teams down?
- 03How do you split engineering time between new product work, platform investment and technical debt?
About this directory
This is a professional research starting point based on business profile data retrieved on . Titles and companies reflect that source snapshot and may describe past or present roles. Check the linked profiles for current details. Inclusion does not imply Instant Expert membership or availability.
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