Business Technology Associate

Public-sector consulting taught me most of what I still carry - the idea that real engineering is mostly operations, that stakeholder management is mostly honesty, and that the difference between a working system and a broken one is usually three small decisions upstream.

I joined Deloitte Consulting out of undergrad as a Business Technology Associate and spent two years in the Hyderabad office delivering to three-plus U.S. state government clients. Public-sector technology is unglamorous work by design - the systems are old, the users are non-negotiable, and the failure modes are publicly visible - which means it’s a sharp environment to learn engineering discipline and stakeholder management at the same time.

The project I’m proudest of from this period was an internal SaaS automated testing tool I built for the delivery teams. Testing across our state-government implementations had become the bottleneck - manual regression cycles ate days per sprint, and every new release reopened the same set of low-value but high-cost checks.

The tool reduced testing time by 45 percent, was adopted across five-plus stakeholder teams within the practice, and earned both the Applause award and an Outstanding recognition. More importantly, it shifted the conversation about testing from “how do we fit it in” to “what do we test next.”

Beyond individual engineering, I worked along with four cross-functional teams - development, QA, and implementation - coordinating across three-plus U.S. state government clients with overlapping release schedules. The hardest part of the work wasn’t technical; it was keeping the truth moving between people who had every incentive to not share bad news until the last responsible moment.

That’s the skill I still lean on most today: the ability to reduce a noisy multi-stakeholder conversation into the one sentence that has to be said, and then say it.

In the final stretch of my time at Deloitte, I led the work that resolved a chain of delivery bottlenecks we’d inherited from an earlier phase. The numbers came out clean: 30 percent faster development and delivery across five consecutive sprints. The non-numeric version of that result is simpler - we stopped ending Fridays with a fire drill.