Gautam Madaan
Gautam Madaan was born in Rewari, a small town in India that is about 2 hours outside of New Delhi. When he was young, his parents made the bold decision to leave the familiarity of their home and pursue better educational opportunities for their children. Forever thankful to his parents for making that decision, Gautam knows that their impact didn’t stop there. When he was 9 years old, they ensured he had access to computers and enrolled him in a basic programming course. At the time, he was coding a pointer, and making it draw lines on a screen, but this simple exercise would serve as the launching point for his software engineering career.
By doing well on exams in high school, Gautam was able to access the most prestigious educational institutions, and experiences. While at Delhi College of Engineering, Gautam attended robotics workshops, and built remote control cars for various competitions. Eventually, he went on to expand his knowledge base at Carnegie Mellon University where he obtained a master’s degree in computer software engineering.
In 2009, working on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles brought Gautam to the United States for the first time. Competing in a large UAV competition, Gautam and his team caught the eye of Lockheed Martin executives, who then brought the young innovators under their wing to build a new UAV with specifications outlined by the defense contractor. For 1.5 years, Gautam worked in a startup environment, figuring out how to lead an autopilot software team, and design systems to achieve a goal. The project culminated with a successful conceptual design of the next generation urban unmanned aircraft system and was presented to the defense leaders of India.
After completing his university degree, he joined SAP Labs as a software engineer. Focusing on full-stack web applications, Gautam took the opportunity to figure out the parts of software engineering he loved most. Leading teams at SAP, creating software, attending virtual classes across US universities, and reading books helped him decide that he wanted to solve strategic problems, and create large-scale solutions.
It wasn’t long before Gautam was working at PayPal as a software engineer. In his nearly 4 years at the company, Gautam was a strategic thought leader and a skilled engineer; he brought visions to life and transformed how PayPal served its customers. Working on a project with PayPal’s Innovation Lab, Gautam led the front-end engineering team, and product team in an effort to launch a blockchain-based employee incentive platform His work at PayPal’s innovation lab culminated with him being recognized as one of the Top 3 innovators in the organization in 2018. Additionally, Gautam worked on the onboarding platform technology migration project, which further increased his impact on PayPal. The project brought in $67.7M in additional revenue, and set the foundation of a modern web, and mobile onboarding platform at PayPal.
Now software engineering manager at Twilio, Gautam’s career has been filled with technical challenges and leadership challenges, but he always rises to the occasion. He has helped modernize Twilio’s platform through APIs and artificial intelligence while boosting the team dynamic within the organization’s engineering department. He’s made it possible for the organization’s clients to access self-serve solutions to their issues, resulting in over $1.5 million in annual savings, and that just scratches the surface of the impact he has made. Gautam also reduced the time agents spent on certain tasks by 400-600 hours per month.
Since 2019, Gautam has filed 9 patents with different technological applications. His patents range from load balancing for map application route selection and output to providing haptic feedback on screen. The range of his filed patents emphasizes Gautam’s ability to enter a new space, become a technical expert, and use product innovation to enhance that space. Moreover, Gautam is the sole inventor on two of those patents. . One impacts battery performance and payment convenience by detecting changes in the magnetic field surrounding a communication device and the other boosts short-range communication capabilities for specific devices. In other patent filings, Gautam did a lot of work on solution architecture and design before helping bring the new inventions to life. Not only does he challenge software engineers around him, but he uplifts the industry as a whole, expanding its reach, and adding new layers to the impact it can have on society.
Finding one’s place in the world where one can truly make an impact doesn’t happen for everyone, but Gautam figured out early on where his skills would be best utilized and didn’t take his foot off the gas. He worked diligently to make an impact and he also spends time as a mentor and angel investor to help others make an impact, too. His commitment to advancing technology is changing the future of society one patent at a time.
