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Bellevue, WA, USA

Kajal D.

Delivering on vision - A Business-Savvy Product & Engineering Leader in Tech

Leveraging a remarkable journey from an engineer on offshore oil rigs to a pivotal leader at Amazon AWS, I embody a fusion of deep technical expertise, strategic business acumen, and a keen sense of market needs. I am a graduate of IIT Delhi, with an MBA from Harvard Business School.

At my core, I'm driven by the thrill of transforming challenges into opportunities, orchestrating the dance between product vision and engineering execution. It's not just about the features; it's about discerning the few that truly matter.

I am adept at technology, having also led engineering teams in my General Manager role at AWS. This unique fusion of technical depth and business savvy allows me to deliver sharp product strategy, with clear path for engineering teams to execute

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Kajal D.

Experience

Jan 2025 — Present
SmartVerify Inc

SmartVerify Inc

CEO and Founder

SmartVerify secures the application-to-data pathway, helping enterprises own their data security in the age of AI

  • Raised Angel investment to build initial MVP
  • filed patent (2025) for unique technology and approach to deliver “air gapped” data security, enabling applications to interact with datasets, without handing over dataset credentials
  • Successfully secured several initial customers, and is engaged in building out initial MVP
Sep 2016 — Jan 2025
Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

General Manager

I was the product and engineering leader for two AWS services, over my tenure: (1) Amazon WorkSpaces. Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure cloud desktop service, which essentially created the cloud DaaS (Desktop as a Service) market. The service allows customer to implement VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) capabilities on-demand globally. (2) AWS Audit Manager. AWS Audit Manager is a service that helps organizations simplify risk and compliance audits by continuously auditing their use of AWS services to automatically collect evidence. It automates the collection of evidence from your AWS resources, stores it in an auditor-friendly format, and helps you build audit-ready reports based on pre-built or custom frameworks for specific regulations like PCI, HIPAA, or internal requirements.

  • P&L ownership for AWS Audit Manager service that helps customers prepare for IT audits (eg- PCI, HIPAA, SOC2 etc)
  • Launched a “Best practices framework on using Generative AI services on AWS,” helping customers cut through the noise and FUD around responsible AI, and providing clear step by step guideline and automated data collection for Gen AI implementationstio
  • Prepared and drove the public launch of Audit Manager service in Dec 2020; this included working closely with engineers on service architecture, defining positioning, pricing dimensions, analyst relations, and go-to-market activities
  • For Workspaces, I grew revenue 10x (from $50M-$500M) between 2017 to 2020 by picking 3 high impact product features from a long list of feature requests
Aug 2015 — Sep 2016
Honeywell

Honeywell

Director, IoT SaaS portfolio

Led a corporate startup, formed to deliver high-value IoT (Internet of Things) scenarios that utilized Honeywell sensors and systems. Carried a revenue goal of $7M for 2016. This was a 10 person team including a system architect, developers, a designer, product managers, researcher and product marketer

  • Developed a solution and started a Proof of Concept with a 19-chain hospital on east coast that would exceed the $7M revenue goal for 2016
Aug 2006 — Aug 2015
Microsoft

Microsoft

Principal Product Manager

I held multiple Principal/Senior product management roles at Microsoft, across Azure, Windows, and SQL Server

  • Completed plan for launch of a high I/O compute SKU
  • Did compete benchmarking study of Azure services vs Amazon Web Services and Google: this was significant input into engineering, highlighting product needs vs competition
  • Developed an affinity analysis that showed what service a customer is likely to adopt based on what they have already adopted
  • Defined pricing for new license offering for virtualization on tablet devices (Commercial Subscription License)
  • Led segmentation strategy, and product positioning for Windows Live suite (Hotmail, Messenger and suite of products like Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Blog Writer, Mail client, etc)
  • Did the pricing work for the SQL Server 2008 launch, mapping out impact and response to new industry trends: virtualization and introduction of multi-core processors