It was 2023, Me being in a new city, Bengaluru, nearing the end of the startup I was working on. Starting to apply for full time role during a time when top companies were pausing interviews. Got a call from Conde Nast for an interview for which I was shortlisted months back. Gave my 3 rounds of interview, this must be the coolest and most casual interview I gave. Conde Nast came into my life when I needed it exactly.

Joined my first big step in my career. A great team, where everyone had huge knowledge of the data & business of Conde. I was hired to pull this data from the analytics platform, Qlik, and build more interactive and customizable websites with React JS.

It was challenging, as my team lacked front-end knowledge and fewer documentation on Qlik. I started reading every documentation of and on Qlik. Built my first POC, which also proved to the team that this is possible. On the way, I discovered TailwindCSS, which I think I will be using for the rest of my life 😂.

After almost a year team hired a senior, Pradeep Nayak, to guide and work with me. Now that my workload was reduced, the team was able to experiment more, especially my manager, Saranya. We built almost 1 POC with a new idea every 2 months. Parallel a new analytics project was started, Beacon. Beacon was supposed to be very granular-level analytics on every article published. Which will be used by editors and the business team to understand and analyse the trends. I spent majority of my time building Beacon, bug fixing and adding new features.

One of my close to heart POC was Mercury. This is a conversational analytics platform, where users interact with data in natural language. With this, I started exploring the blooming AI Agent development. Explore Langchain and different models published by OpenAI. To improve the agent’s answer, solutions were created with Embedding, Vector Stores and RAG. I did a conditional pipeline on the AI calls. This also let me explore Node JS for the backend. Created APIs following MVC architectures. Had to go through some Low-Level Design patterns and principles to make an effective backend for Mercury.

Now, in 2026, still going strong with more POC and more projects on the list to explore.