From $13 Salaries to VP of Cloud Ops: A Journey

Full transcript

Hire for attitude

So welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today, we are joined by Baiju, who's the vice president of cloud operations & corp IT at Corcentric. Sorry. Can we redo it? Yeah. For sure. My name is Baiju Baiju Joseph. Baiju. Okay. Baiju. Yeah. This is That's fine. So Baiju. Okay. Yeah. I'm I'm sorry. I always have a hard time pronouncing names. That's okay. I think you're doing it for the first time. And can I call Zach or Yeah? Zach or Nicholas. However you you like. Okay. Okay. So by by Joseph. Alright? Okay. Good stuff. Welcome back welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today, we are joined by Baiju who's the vice president of cloud operations & corp IT at Corcentric. Baiju, welcome to the podcast. Hey. Thank you, Zach. It's nice talking to you. Why don't we start this by you telling us a little bit about yourself and what you guys do at Corcentric? Awesome. Yeah. This it's a twenty five plus year old year journey. I I remember one of my early I started as a sales guy after my engineering

selling push button fonts, and I think I used to get 12 to $13 per month as my salary in India, monthly salary. So it's tough days. And from there, I went I was a lecturer for a year teaching electronics biomedical engineering, then went on to broadcasting engineering. I was a broadcasting engineer with the government of India for many years and done some real cool stuff on both digital, on broadcasting, on something with computer. That's the time I learned computer, tried to apply. Then later, I joined this company called Novell. And I don't know if the new gen people will know about it. I think this new Novell was the network of that base. This is around 2,000. So I was at Novell helping the team to do the e directory, which is like directory for the world. I was in the system testing team. And later, I joined Corcentric, one of the b to b commerce companies leading their India setting up their India operations initially and helping to lot of their moving lot of their teams to India. And later,

some of the HR HR and VPs moved to Yahoo, and they asked me to come and join Yahoo to lead the Yahoo emerging market countries quality engineering practice and went on to become doing release engineering for the emerging market countries. And it's an amazing experience working on different different products in the search, in the Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Small Business. I think one of the very rare places you need to pay to Yahoo to kinda use it and worked in different roles from different capacities. I was an engineering director. I was the SAARI leader for the Yahoo small business. I was the DevOps leader. So I worked on different capacities, build some products from ground up, ideated and build some products from ground up like the Yahoo website editor, which was used by the small business teams. And part of that journey when Yahoo got acquired by Verizon, so that's another amazing experience working at that scale on a telecom company. I was the dev ops strategist for their API platform. And later at CoreCentric, I'm leading the companies. The entire dev ex, anything from code to production, our infrastructure,

AI to fool systems

and I'm also responsible for the employee facing the corporate IT team. Yep. That that's me. Okay. And with all of this experience, you know, that spans over more than twenty five years, what are some of the trends that you're currently seeing in the cloud operations and IT space? Yeah. I think if you if you look at I was talking to my mentor the other day, and I was telling him during novel days, maybe you you learn something new maybe every one year and try to apply, but here, it's everyday change. So one of the biggest trend of of late and something which we are trying to use or implement at my current job, one is the shift to autonomy. No. The shift to autonomy, whether it is the zero touch CI/CD automation, whether the AI driven operations for identifying or detecting incidents, catching them early before they become material become they realize and coming back with preventive measures. So the early early failure detection, autonomy, and the rise of agent decay, I think that's the the latest trend which I'm kind of seeing. It's very fast paced.

I think the accelerator is the keyword. The agent decay AI and tokens is the keyword. Okay. And is there any particular challenge that you faced recently? And how have you overcome it? One of the biggest challenges is adopting to you're enabling your teams to adapt to these changes. How will you one side, we need to deliver the products. At the same time, you need to continuously learn as a team so that you can apply this for example, the SRE agent which you're trying to implement. How you build this agent? How will you use it? And how will you use part of your whether your DevEx journey or whether your infrastructure, how will you apply it? And you apply this, and then the the technology changed then other day in the next month. I I remember recently, we thought we'll build our AI using Amazon Bedrock. And then few months back, Amazon announced agent core. So how will you kind of quickly adapt? How will you build for these changes, and how will you adapt quickly without derailing the customer delight? No. Customer need to keep the they should see that things are good, all good.

And so adapting to this this change at this agentic speed is one of the challenge, and we are trying to find out ways where telling teams spend giving them time to learn these things, building ambassadors among teams. So there are you know, two, three of them become ambassador. They they see the value of it. They're able to kind of go and evangelize across the things. Mhmm. And with all this experience that you have, how do you approach making architecture and design decisions in your account operations? Yeah. We think one of the principle which we kind of follow so at the company level, there are architecture blueprints, architecture guidance, and make them loosely club coupled and flexible. So if you look at the infrastructure design, what we what we build, we keep it in line with the enterprise architecture so that if when the enterprise architecture, there are changes, we can adopt it. So what what we what we typically do, I'll I'll tell simple examples how our infrastructure should be designed from a network perspective, from a security perspective, access perspective. We try to do everything as code, you know, infrastructure as code,

AI awareness gap

network as code, any change as code, your CICD as code, or your agent DevOps as code. So everything is fortified and is so tomorrow and we try to abstract common things at a on a platform level, like CICD as a platform. So if there are 10 teams need to build it, CICD, you don't need to build it yourself. You have a a reusable platform for CICD, and others can use it. So if you need to make a change, you can make a change at the abstraction, and others can consume it. I think that that's something which we are trying to do. Mhmm. And, Baiju, as a leader, what has been kind of the most significant challenge that you've faced in scaling the team and the organization up? Good question. I think the one of the one of the recent challenges which we see is it's identifying the right talent. We are we're a global company, and I've been doing global expansions from my Yahoo days. Now in Yahoo, I was leader for the emerging market countries, but we are all physically located during that days. Now we could see people face to face

and bring talent in and then groom them, you know, enable them and empower them to grow. And as a team, you play and you win. In this new world, there are two challenges. One is, yeah, we are remote. We are we are still building global teams in my current job. And a lot of these interviews, a lot of this talent finding, we are using remote mechanisms in some cases and using AI tools. But I think there are also candidates who use AI to fool the system. So how will you really find out, you know, this is the right talent? Oh, this is the this is the engineer whom I talked during interview is actually coming and working for for me. Now there there are challenges, and we've seen cases where we we tell during interview, we have an AI tool. We'll we'll find out whether if you are you are not being truthful

in what you're doing. The the tool what we have or AI intervention tool will capture it, but there's still I think sometimes they will be more advanced than our tool, and then then we're seeing such cases, and we immediately disqualify them. The moment we catch it, we disc I think that's not one of the challenges which I'm facing. The other one is how will you identify a talent who can quickly adapt new things and bring in lot more value? It's not about no. It's no no more about its basic skills. I I I remember one of the early lessons as a manager I learned is hire for attitude and train for skills. Hire for attitude and train for skills. So in the attitude, oh, are they able to quickly adapt, quickly learn, and make the current system a better system? And how will you find that during interview? Whether they had similar patterns?

I think that that's another challenge. It was a lot easier earlier. Oh, I've seen this is a quick learner. And even if I bring in somebody without a Kubernetes knowledge, I know this engineer will quickly pick up because the they have the base build and release knowledge is so strong and shown patterns of learning, so we can do it. Now in this new world, it's the the learning is a lot more faster. You know, the the AI, they need to learn fast learn a lot more faster. They need to build things faster and adopt it. So I think there's two challenges. One is how will you build a trust based hiring system so that you bring in the right talent, and then how you identify in this talent who are more adaptable to the acceleration and the AI. Mhmm. I have an interesting question for you. If you had the power to change one thing about the cloud operations industry, what would you change? I think I'm I'm gonna talk a lot about today's world. There is I think if you look at a lot of the industry,

a lot of the people who are running the company today, there are a lot of employees who may not be really AI aware, not token aware. We see cases that how the token is stealing the dollars. No? So I would one thing I would like to change and make it a lot more visible. Now this is what you really need to to to to do your work. This is what you really need. Make it can can AI tell that, hey. This is not what you really need. You know? For example, to go from here, from my home to the church, do we need a super jet, or do we need my normal car normal car? And some things can be done by normal car or something. I need a super jet. So in the token world, you know, where because it's going to cost you dollars, if there is a mechanism I I can industry can change, I can change make it visible to people. Oh, this is what you need out of this 10,000 AI tools available. This is what you need for this work, or this is what you need for this work?

Mhmm. Great by you. So for those that are interested in connecting with you or actually learning more about what you guys do, where can they find you? You can see me on LinkedIn. I usually post some of the articles there. I am also in sometimes in conferences. Yeah. I think these are the two, three places you can kind of see me. Also, deliver talks at at universities once in a while to share the knowledge. So, yeah, if there are if they want to listen and or maybe share any ideas, I'm open. You can connect me on LinkedIn. Okay. Great. Bye, Baiju. Thanks for joining. I will make sure to add links to your LinkedIn profile, And thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Awesome. Hey. Thank you, Zach, for this opportunity. It's great talking to you. Great knowing about your work. All the best for this amazing work, what you're doing to evangelize what's happening in the industry. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.