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# Hi 👋, I'm Ashwini Kumar ### Engineering Leader · Scaling Travel Tech Across Asia · Building AI-Native Teams

🧭 Engineering Leadership & Strategy

I lead engineering the way I’d want to be led — clear mandate, high ownership, ruthless focus on outcomes over output. As a Senior Engineering Manager at Omio, I turn ambiguous business bets into shipped, scalable systems and grow the people who build them.

📈 Strategy & Scale — I translate company-level goals into technical roadmaps, set the architectural direction for systems serving millions of travelers, and make the build-vs-buy, now-vs-later calls that keep delivery fast without mortgaging the future.
👥 People & Engineering Management — I built a new engineering org in India from zero to a high-performing team, hiring, mentoring, and creating the career frameworks, feedback loops, and on-call culture that let engineers do their best work.
⚙️ Engineering Excellence — I raise the floor and the ceiling: spec-driven development, strong review culture, observability, and rollback-first delivery so the team ships confidently and recovers gracefully.
🌐 Cross-functional Delivery — Aligning product, design, and business stakeholders across time zones and verticals to deliver coherent, on-time outcomes.

🚀 What I’m Building Now @ Omio

🌏 Asia Expansion — Spearheading Omio’s growth across Asia, building the multi-modal travel experience spanning Japan and South East Asia — bringing rail, bus, air, and ground transport into a single seamless journey, backed by a new engineering team I’m scaling in India.
⛴️ Ferries — Owning engineering for Omio’s worldwide Ferries business end-to-end — from provider integrations to the booking flows travelers depend on across the globe.

Before Omio, I led a high-performing team at PayU Finance, delivering FinTech solutions that scaled user experience and business outcomes.

🤖 Building an AI-Native Engineering Team

I’m on a mission to make my team AI-native — not by adding tools, but by rewiring how we build so AI compounds developer leverage at every stage of the SDLC. The goal: faster product development, higher quality, less toil.

⚡ Developer Productivity — Embedding AI copilots and agents into daily workflows so engineers spend time on judgment, not boilerplate.
🔁 AI-Powered Code Reviews — Automated first-pass reviews that catch bugs, security issues, and style drift before a human ever looks — reviewers focus on design, not nitpicks.
📝 Spec-Driven Development — A standardized spec.md as the single source of truth — goals, non-goals, acceptance criteria, observability, and rollback — driving both implementation and AI-assisted testing.
🛠️ Workflow Automation — Orchestrating n8n pipelines and agentic workflows to automate ops, reporting, and glue work across the engineering toolchain.
🚢 One-Touch Deployments — AI-assisted release pipelines that make shipping to production a single, safe, observable action.
📊 Observability for AI — Tracing and evaluating LLM-powered features and dev tooling with LangFuse, so AI in the loop stays measurable and trustworthy.

Philosophy: AI doesn’t replace engineering judgment — it amplifies it. My job is to build the guardrails, culture, and tooling that let a small team ship like a large one.

🛠️ Tech & Tools

👨‍💻 About Me

With 10+ years building customer-facing applications, I specialize in architecting highly scalable systems across FinTech, Gaming, Entertainment, Healthcare, and eCommerce — a breadth that shapes a holistic approach to technical leadership.

🏅 Google Developer Expert in Firebase — real-time, cloud-based solutions in consumer apps at scale.
🎓 Mentor at Scaler — guiding the next generation of engineers.
🏛️ Alumnus of NIT Tiruchirappalli — with leadership roles at Disney+ Hotstar, Mobile Premier League, InCred, 1mg, and Oracle.
🎲 Off the clock: board games like Monopoly and Life, and reading up on emerging tech.