Open to VP & Senior Director Roles

DARSHAN S MAHENDRAKAR

Senior Technical Product Leader & AI Strategist — building enterprise GenAI platforms that scale to petabytes, serving thousands daily.

Austin, TX Product Director @ GSK 12+ Years Experience
Darshan S Mahendrakar — AI Strategist, Austin TX
12+Years exp.
1.5K+AI models
10K+Daily users
$20M+Budget led
Darshan S Mahendrakar
About Me

Building AI
Platforms That
Actually Scale

I'm a Senior Technical Product Leader & AI Strategist with 12+ years at the intersection of enterprise software, data engineering, and cutting-edge GenAI platforms.

As Product Director for Enterprise GenAI Platform at GSK, I lead vision, strategy, and execution of multi-cloud AI infrastructure powering 1,500+ models and 35+ applications.

My expertise spans the full lifecycle — from architecture to GTM — with deep focus on AI Governance, Responsible AI, and scalable hybrid-cloud solutions.

GenAI Platform Leadership

Governed Agent 365, Glean, Writer, Claude Code & Gemini Enterprise. Built LLM + MCP gateway on Kong AI with automated guardrails.

Multi-Cloud Architecture

GenAI Dev Kit across Azure, GCP & Databricks. Expert in EKS/AKS/GKE Kubernetes at petabyte scale.

Organizational Leadership

Managed geo-distributed teams and $20M+ budgets. Aligned engineering, security & business on unified GenAI strategy.

Responsible AI & Governance

FDA/GxP compliant environments, RBAC/ABAC security policies, and enterprise Trust & Safety frameworks at scale.

Technical Skills

Full-Stack AI
Expertise

Proficiency
Expert Proficient Familiar
01 — GenAI & ML
Generative AI & Machine Learning
Amazon Bedrock Azure OpenAI Vertex AI AzureML Claude Code Databricks Mosaic AI Kong AI Gateway LLMOps
02 — Cloud
Cloud & Infrastructure
Azure GCP AWS Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) Docker Helm Agent 365
03 — Data
Data Platforms
Databricks Azure Synapse CosmosDB Hadoop / HDFS Snowflake MongoDB
04 — DevOps
DevOps & IaC
Terraform Jenkins Vault CI/CD Ansible
05 — Engineering
Languages & APIs
Python FastAPI REST / GraphQL SQL Java
06 — Governance
AI Governance & Security
Responsible AI MCP / A2A GraphRAG FDA / GxP RBAC / ABAC OAuth / SAML
Career Journey

Professional
Experience

– Present
GSK
Product Director, Enterprise GenAI Platform
Full-time · Austin, TX (Hybrid)
  • Strategy: Set GenAI & Agentic AI vision; governed Agent 365, Glean, Writer, Claude Code, Gemini Enterprise.
  • Platform: Multi-cloud GenAI Dev Kit (Azure, GCP, Databricks) powering 1,500+ models and 35+ apps.
  • Gateway: Built LLM & MCP gateway on Kong AI with automated provisioning and enterprise guardrails.
  • ML: Fine-tuned LLMs, transformers, GraphRAG, synthetic data; piloted Claude Code & Writer for delivery velocity.
  • GTM: Led go-to-market for internal GenAI tools; evangelized MCP Server & A2A on petabytes of data.
  • Leadership: Managed geo-distributed teams and $20M+ annual budget; unified platform, security & business.
Nov 2020 – Nov 2022
GSK R&D Tech
Product Director, Enterprise Data Platform
Full-time · Austin, TX
  • Architected global multi-cloud storage (Azure/Synapse) managing petabytes as backbone for enterprise analytics.
  • Grew self-service data portal to 10,000+ daily users via UX modernisation and Terraform one-click provisioning.
  • Delivered FDA/GxP compliant environment with granular RBAC/ABAC across the full data pipeline.
  • Designed REST APIs and SDKs enabling seamless downstream integrations.
Oct 2016 – Oct 2020
GSK R&D Tech
Manager, Platform Lead
Full-time
  • Architected cluster-on-demand Cloudera environments; automated CI/CD and REST APIs.
  • Secured stack with AD Kerberos, KTS, KMS, TLS; containerised services on Docker Swarm.
  • HA/DR with NetApp and F5; tuned SOLR, HBase, HDFS for performance.
Jul 2015 – Sep 2016
Kaiser Permanente
Big Data Engineer
Full-time
  • Built Hadoop pipelines using MapReduce, Sqoop (HDFS ↔ MySQL), and Oozie orchestration.
  • Automated Hive, Impala, and Sentry workspaces; managed cluster operations.
Jan 2015 – Jun 2015
Cloudwick Inc.
Hadoop Engineer
Full-time
  • Built distributed data platforms across Cloudera, Hortonworks, MAPR, and Datastax Cassandra.
  • Designed high-performance Cassandra clusters and Hive schemas.
Academic Background

Education

🎓
Master of Science, Computer Science
California State University, East Bay
GPA 3.6Class of 2014Hayward, CA
🏛️
Bachelor of Technology, CS & Engineering
Vinayaka Mission University, Salem
GPA 3.72Class of 2012India
Open Source

GitHub Projects

@darshan-sm
Darshan S Mahendrakar
@darshan-sm
— followers— stars
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Thinking Out Loud

Writing on Medium

View all articles on Medium →
Resume

Grab My
Resume

Clean one-page format — ATS-ready and recruiter-friendly.

Let's Talk

Let's Build
Something
Together

Open to VP/Director-level roles in AI, cloud, and pharma tech — Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Shopify, and beyond.

Available for
Networking & Hiring Conversations
AI Strategy Discussions
GenAI Consulting & Advisory
Speaking Opportunities & Mentorship
Schedule a call

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Book a Call

Opens Google Calendar · Austin CT · Remote friendly