Hi 👋, I'm Ashwini Kumar

Engineering Leader · Organisation Builder · Global Expansion · AI-Native Engineering

I build high-performing engineering organisations and global consumer products—from Bharat-scale platforms to new markets. Today, I lead Omio's Bengaluru Engineering Center, Asia expansion, and global Ferries engineering.

🚀 What I'm Building at Omio

🌏 Asia Expansion - Leading expansion in India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. The work connects product, commercial, operations, and technology to deliver coherent multimodal journeys.
⛴️ Global Ferries - Owning engineering across provider integrations, search, booking, ticketing, and reliability for a global Ferries business.
🏗️ Organisation Building - Built and scaled Omio's Bengaluru Engineering Center, with hiring, career growth, and operating habits designed for durable teams.
✨ Product Delivery - Led launches including the Japan Rail Pass, AI-powered Japan Travel Planner, Delayed Booking, and the engineering blog.

🧭 Engineering Leadership & Strategy

Senior Engineering Manager at Omio. I turn market and product bets into technical strategy, align distributed stakeholders, and build the teams that deliver measurable outcomes.

📈 Strategy & Direction - I frame ambiguous goals as clear bets, explicit trade-offs, and technical roadmaps for systems serving millions of travelers.
👥 People & Teams - I develop engineering managers, senior engineers, and leadership bench strength while creating high-ownership teams that can make strong decisions independently.
⚙️ Execution with Guardrails - Strong specs, thoughtful review, observability, and safe rollback paths help teams ship quickly without trading away reliability.

🤖 Making the Team AI-Native

I'm working on making my team genuinely AI-native. That means changing how we build software, not just which tools we use.

AI copilots and agents are part of daily workflows, reserving people-time for problems that need judgment.
AI-assisted workflows reduce administrative overhead and reserve people-time for problems that need judgment.
Clear specifications, thoughtful review, and observability help delivery stay grounded and reliable.
I focus on using AI to make engineering work more effective and repeatable.

AI makes good engineers faster. My focus is on the guardrails and tooling that let a small team do more than its size suggests.

👨‍💻 About Me

Built and scaled products across travel, fintech, media, gaming, and healthcare. Before Omio, I built and led an engineering organisation at PayU Finance, shipping lending products and modernising delivery across backend, web, and mobile.

🏅 Google Developer Expert in Firebase
🎓 Mentor at Scaler
🚀 Mentor for Google Play Accelerator for Startups in India
🏛️ NIT Tiruchirappalli alumnus, with stints at Hotstar, MPL, PayU Finance, InCred, 1mg, Trimble and Oracle.
🎲 Off the clock: board games (Monopoly, Game of Life) and keeping up with emerging tech.