Akshay Bharath

Accomplished mobile engineer with a demonstrated history of effective leadership, team management, and mentorship. I adapt my leadership approach to align with the unique needs of each opportunity and organization, with a strong preference for coaching and servant-leadership styles. Highly driven and proactive, I thrive on tackling diverse challenges, whether they involve technical problem-solving or team dynamics. I take great satisfaction in mentoring fellow engineers and providing support when needed. My expertise extends to the intricate aspects of mobile app development, including networking, thread management, UI/UX design, analytics, and more. I am committed to staying current with the latest libraries, frameworks, and industry best practices, continuously learning from thought leaders in the field.

Engineering Manager - Ro (New York, NY)

Apr 2023 - Feb 2025

• Led a team of 7 engineers to develop patient-facing features for native iOS and web applications, driving a 20% to 40% increase in the company’s North Star metric through innovative solutions and cross-functional collaboration.
• Spearheaded the rollout of a critical HealthKit integration, collaborating with product, design, legal, and clinical teams to boost weight data ingestion by 40%.
• Designed and launched a monthly Product Health Check process with product management, reducing p95 latency to under 500 ms by identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks.
• Built and scaled the iOS engineering team, hiring and onboarding 3 new engineers within 6 months, while fostering a culture of innovation by allocating 20% sprint time for tech debt and career-aligned side projects.
• Developed and streamlined release processes, including introducing a Release Captain rotation and daily staging builds, improving release efficiency and cross-team collaboration.
• Championed team growth and knowledge sharing by establishing the Monthly Mobile Mixer, a forum for discussing iOS frameworks, problem-solving, and industry trends, while mentoring a senior iOS engineer to improve performance.
• Defined prerequisites and strategy for exploring a native Android app, including conducting a design audit, addressing iOS performance issues, and evaluating multi-platform solutions, ensuring alignment with long-term mobile product goals.
• Improved release planning and stakeholder communication by implementing a project timeline tracker alongside JIRA, visualizing upcoming releases and enhancing transparency with leadership and cross-functional teams.

Lead iOS Engineer - Rally (New York, NY)

June 2022 - Apr 2023

• Implemented and delivered delightful iOS user experiences for the Rally trading experience.
• Designed and delivered engaging iOS user experiences for the Rally trading platform, driving a nearly 30% increase in active user investment across multiple asset classes.
• Built out scalable SPM packages that separated different layers of the app.
• Introduced SwiftUI into a UIKit-heavy code base along with best practices for the team.
• Introduced Async/Await into the codebase to unlock more future-proof asynchronous mechanisms.
• Worked with product and design leads to ensure we were unlocking the right user outcomes.
• Introduced new processes and workflows to improve the quality & speed of delivery across the eng org.
• Mentored and provided actionable feedback for other less-experienced iOS and non-iOS engineers.
• Worked with the CTO to introduce a new tech spike and discovery process to help surface risks and tradeoffs for all projects.

iOS Engineering Manager - Aedit (New York, NY)

September 2020 - May 2022

• Managed, coached, and led the iOS team to build user-friendly experiences in the core iOS app.
• Implemented a brand new Agile process that completely changed how we managed tickets.
• Developed Team OKRs based on company OKRs that were used to track our quarterly work.
• Implemented new team processes to improve code quality and velocity.
• Provided frequent feedback and guidance via weekly 1:1s and yearly performance reviews.
• Identified cross-functional dependencies and removed blockers across all the stakeholders.
• Built several intuitive and responsive scanning features using SwiftUI based on design specs.
• Migrated our complex network library classes to Combine.
• Improved team’s app submission velocity by over 50% using Fastlane.
• Worked with the web EM to ensure consistent release patterns and quality checks across the org.

Senior Mobile Engineer and Tech Lead - Animoto (New York, NY)

May 2014 - September 2020

• Led a team of six to develop a brand new iOS product from scratch using Swift.
• Helped architect and develop the main MVVM-C architecture using RxSwift.
• Worked with the product designer to build a user-friendly UX for all new features.
• Participated in full discovery cycles to better identify and prioritize new user opportunities.
• Used both qualitative and quantitative data to ensure the product was meeting our goals.
• Worked with partner PMs to better plan and estimate quarterly requirements.
• Supervised all the mobile interns that were brought on over the last two years.
• Designed and developed test automation framework for new service within Animoto.
• Created tools to improve product deployment and test automation.
• Implemented a highly scalable CI system that was used for a new backend service.

Software Development Engineer 2 - Microsoft (Redmond, WA)

Sept 2013 - Apr 2014

• Designed and implemented telemetry APIs in C++ for core Windows 8 Office apps.
• Helped design new reporting tool to capture telemetry data for Office apps.
• Created a few performance measurement tools using C#.
• Helped maintain the performance test collection service.
• Mentored new SDE hires.

Software Development Engineer - Microsoft (Redmond, WA)

Sept 2009 - Apr 2013

• Designed and developed a tool called ChaosChimp that injects failures against a cluster.
• Designed and developed a test framework in C#.
• Wrote cluster deployment tools in PowerShell.
• Designed and implemented many stress and failure test cases for our product.
• Mentored the intern on our team.

Bachelor of Computer Science (BCS)

September 2004 - May 2009

University of Waterloo