Welcome to Meet Your Manager where you’ll get a chance to learn about the individual driving Zerocater’s engineering team expansion in India to change a $180 billion industry with technology that helps companies build a better workplace culture through food.
- Rahul Sharma
- Country Head – India
- Bangalore
What did you do prior to joining Zerocater and how did you end up at Zerocater?
I have worn multiple hats like CTO, Vice President, Senior Engineering Manager, Architect & Software engineer while building world-class products & teams at top-notch VC-funded startups. These startups have been acquired by Fortune 500 companies like Juniper Networks, Hewlett Packard, and Alcatel Lucent & delivered products with annual revenues of $900M.
Zerocater caught my eye because of the universal problem it is solving for every office-goer.
We have a love and hate relationship with our office cafeterias. We don’t like the same bland food nor want to travel for a couple of hours for meals. Zerocater solves this big problem with its customer-obsessed food matching technology & consistently great cuisines resulting in a superlative Food Experience at the Office Cafeterias.
What is unique or motivating about the work you do at Zerocater?
The Zerocater engineering team is one of the best teams I have come across in the last 20 years. As we build and scale our teams, our new engineers will be able to re-architect revenue-generating products & learn great engineering practices from our team in Silicon Valley.
This gives me an opportunity to build and nurture a team that works together with the right spirit. One thing that is fairly sorted out at Zerocater is its culture & values, we really take pride in our culture. As part of the senior leadership team, we strive to make sure that our team members are provided with the right environment to contribute toward the vision and mission of Zerocater and our customers’ happiness.
Since you are fairly new to joining Zerocater, what project or initiative are you most excited about?
Being able to contribute towards products that enable happiness and smiles on our customers’ faces is a great satisfaction. Our mission is accomplished, when we bring employees closer to each other either on a personal level or for solving a great problem.
I am really excited about several initiatives like our demand prediction technology, food matching technology, on-demand meals at cafeterias, and simplification of complex workflows for menu curation & food experience. Our journey into tapping network effects, loyalty programs & product-led growth is just getting started.
As our business grows exponentially, the engineering team has an opportunity to contribute toward vertical and horizontal scaling of user interfaces, microservices, data stores, ingestion pipelines, analytics & business intelligence products.
Which Zerocater value resonates most with your team?
Customer Obsession – At the core of every business are its customers. Every value, every action and every outcome deliver an intrinsic value to our customers.
Latest technologies, scalable architectures, and impressive UX all of these need to culminate into solving customer needs. Technology is a means to deliver value to our customers & help them in living their lives in a better way. I’ll be customer obsessed along with technology-obsessed.
If there was one word or phrase that describes your company culture what would it be and why?
Achieve outcomes while being humble and respectful.
Within a few days at Zerocater, one thing that I realized is that everyone is respectful of each other. Everyone achieves their outcomes while working together and even the best target achievers or the best technologists are down-to-earth and humble.
As you are building out a brand new team, what do you look for in candidates who want to join your team?
We really look out for engineers with a passion to build products that keep our customers, and internal & external stakeholders happy.
People who are motivated internally to learn, improve and accomplish goals. Passionate people love what they do, they see a purpose in what they are building. Their enthusiasm and positive attitude uplift everyone and help everyone succeed.
What is your favorite food smell and why?
Vanilla coffee is my favorite smell. A mix of two diametrically opposite smells leads to a sweet wake-up call.
