About Nilesh

Technology executive with 15+ years building enterprise-scale Data & AI foundations that have enabled $4.5B in revenue impact across 120M+ customers and 95+ brands.

Executive Summary

Working under the leadership of Chief Digital Officer, led the end-to-end delivery of two enterprise-scale digital transformations at major retail groups, institutionalizing data-driven decision-making, dismantling functional silos, and enabling 80% organization-wide adoption of Data & AI platforms.

A hands-on, outcome-oriented leader who bridges deep technical architecture—AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Data Lakes, Kafka—with business strategy, ensuring every initiative is explicitly tied to revenue growth, conversion uplift, cost efficiency, or measurable productivity gains.

Digital Transformation Impact

$4.5B
Revenue Enabled
120M+
Customers Served
95+
Brands & Business Units
$2.5B
Cost Optimization
$3B
Productivity Enhancement

Professional Experience

Vice President — Group Head of Data, AI & IT Operations
Major Southeast Asian Retail Conglomerate
Bangkok, Thailand | June 2021 – Present
Business Impact: $300M → $4B transformation | 10M → 50M+ customers | 4 retail segments | 3,797+ stores

Key Achievements

  • Unified the foundations of Data, AI, MarTech & IT Ops across 25+ Business Units and 70+ brands
  • Built Data Governance, Omnichannel Data Lakes, Unified Data Models, and enterprise observability
  • Established Unified AI & GenAI Factory with enterprise-grade governance—MLOps, model lifecycle controls
  • Implemented Unified DevOps and Integration foundations (CI/CD, Kubernetes, IaC, event-driven APIs)
  • Achieved 80% enterprise Data & AI adoption with 95% engagement across 10+ departments (60+ members)
Head of MarTech — Data, AI & DevOps Engineering
International Retail Group| 70+ Brands across MENA
Dubai, UAE | May 2020 – June 2021
Business Impact: $0 → $450M digital launch | 70M+ customers | 6 retail segments | 3,000+ stores
  • Established Unified Customer Data & Identity Foundation across 70+ global brands
  • Embedded personalization, CLV, and customer intelligence models delivering ~30% marketing ROI improvement across $50M+ annual spend
  • Built real-time AI personalization platform driving +35% email CTR and +22% web conversion
  • Achieved ~90% adoption of data-driven practices, repositioning Data & AI from an IT function to a sustained competitive advantage
Head of Data, AI & IT Operations
PropTech Unicorn| Real Estate Platform
Dubai, UAE | July 2014 – May 2020
Business Impact: Unified and scaled core proptech assets into a unicorn-grade platform supporting 10M+ users
  • Built high-availability infrastructure serving 10M+ monthly users with 99.95% uptime across 6-year startup-to-unicorn journey
  • Architected Elasticsearch cluster (50M+ queries/day, <200ms latency) with custom scoring and geospatial capabilities
  • Led 25-person engineering team through scaling challenges—platforms acquired at unicorn valuation
  • Optimized AWS costs 40% through strategic capacity planning while reducing release cycles from monthly to daily

Certifications & Education

Professional Certifications
  • • AI+ Chief AI Officer™ Certified | AI CERTs, November 2025
  • • AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate | October 2017
  • • Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer | March 2021
  • • Data Engineering with Google Cloud Specialization | Coursera, March 2021
  • • HarvardX Data Science Certificates | edX (Visualization, R Basics), 2020-2021
Academic Credentials
  • • Master of Technology (M.Tech.), Computer Science
    Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi | 2010-2012
  • • Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.), Computer Science
    Hindustan College of Science and Technology | 2005-2009

Core Technical Expertise

Data Engineering & ML/AI
SparkKafkaAirflowDebezium CDCMLflowKubeflowBERT/LLMComputer Vision
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWSAzureGCPKubernetesDockerTerraform
Databases
PostgreSQLMySQL/MariaDBMongoDBElasticsearchRedisCassandra

Let's Connect

Interested in discussing Data & AI transformation, enterprise architecture, or collaboration opportunities?