Uttara Shekar

Background

About Uttara Shekar

Engineering Manager with 12+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years leading teams of 8–12 engineers at Amazon within the Rufus AI shopping assistant organization - serving 450M+ customers across North America. My teams have driven 50M+ in incremental engagement, helped personalize 66% of AI responses through automated memory extraction, and shipped a streaming API handling 70K+ TPS on Prime Day with zero downtime.I'm now building in the agentic AI space — multi-model architectures for context carryover, long-term memory, and deeper personalization. Having spent years solving these exact problems inside Amazon's conversational AI stack, I bring both the technical depth and the operational instinct for what it takes to ship AI systems that remember, adapt, and scale. I don't just manage teams that build AI products — I vouch for AI-augmented engineering teams, integrating LLM-assisted tooling across the SDLC to multiply team throughput.Before management, I spent 9 years as an IC rising to Senior Engineer - giving me the credibility to go deep on system design and the leadership instinct to coach, not code. I build high-agency teams where engineers own decisions, operate with strategic context, and grow into the next level of their careers.I'm also the author of The Startup Leap: Finding Structure in the Chaotic Journey of Startup Building - a guide for first-time founders drawn from real startup journeys, breaking down the building blocks of going from idea to company. Writing it deepened my conviction that the best products come from people who are curious, systematic, and willing to leap.