Started as the engineer building the pipes. Ended up the person deciding what got built.
Four years at ZS Associates, building data and AI systems for global pharmaceutical clients. The early work was infrastructure: migrating a hand-maintained Excel reporting process onto a layered data lake, designing multi-layer database architectures, building the quality and governance scaffolding that decides whether anyone downstream can trust a number. Unglamorous, and the reason everything after it worked.
Unglamorous, and the reason everything after it worked.
The turn came with an R analytics platform for data scientists. Owned it as a product — talking to the client, deciding what we’d build, leading a team of three. It shipped as an MVP and grew into a $2M+ engagement, mostly because the client kept asking for more of it. That was the lesson the engineering work hadn’t taught: the hardest calls aren’t technical. We deliberately let generated R code execute without an approval click, because three extra clicks would have killed the experience, and gave users an edit button instead. A product decision worth making again.
A product decision worth making again.
Since then the work has moved up the stack. Designed the knowledge base and agent roles for an agentic marketing-mix pipeline built with AWS, now informing $10M+ in annual client spend. Led a cross-functional team turning 6,000+ SOP PDFs into an editable, auditable platform across five regions. Built a chatbot that delivered commercial insights to senior stakeholders across five business units — won an internal innovation award.
Now an MBA candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, concentrating in AI in Business, Business Technologies, and Product Strategy. Here to keep building AI systems — as the person who owns them, rather than the vendor who delivers them. Four years in pharma: building things that survive an audit — access control that holds under pressure, decisions you can trace back, systems a regulated organization will actually adopt. That discipline travels. Looking for the places where it matters most.
That discipline travels.