January 24, 2023

Kiran Bondalapati Joins TRM Labs as VP Engineering

TRM Labs, the leader in blockchain intelligence solutions, is pleased to announce that Kiran Bondalapati has joined TRM Labs as VP Engineering. TRM has a global footprint, with an Engineering team spanning 12 countries that has tripled in size in 2022. The team manages petabyte scale data analysis to drive solutions to the most critical problems of our client base of public sector organizations, financial institutions and crypto companies.

Kiran brings a wealth of experience building and leading engineering teams to deliver world class technology solutions. Prior to joining TRM Labs, Kiran was VP Engineering at Snorkel AI, where he led the engineering team to deliver an enterprise AI product with data-centric workflows, subsequently tripling the organization’s customer base and helping to secure top US banks as clients. Prior to that, Kiran led engineering teams at Cohesity and Uber, and founded and led ZeroStack. In these roles, he has built and scaled engineering teams at various stages of startups with enterprise focus in security, cloud, AI and distributed systems.

As TRM broadens and deepens our solution offering, Kiran's leadership will enable TRM to continue driving rapid product development and tackle complex engineering challenges as new customer needs emerge and evolve.

“We’re excited to welcome Kiran to the team at such a pivotal time in the crypto industry and TRM’s journey” said Rahul Raina, co-founder and CTO of TRM Labs. “Kiran will be instrumental in increasing the momentum of critical product feature delivery, building out our data, and honing in to ensure TRM’s products are evolving at pace with our customers’ needs.

We sat down with Kiran who shared his thoughts on his career thus far and some key learnings for those working in engineering functions.

How did your previous roles contribute to your career progression?

Since the early days of my career, I have always been attracted to solving challenging technical problems in order to resolve a customer pain point. My experience as an early engineer within startups contributed to my understanding of how to scale businesses both from a technical and organizational perspective. With this knowledge, I then founded my own company in 2014, which was an extremely empowering experience as it allowed me to learn more about scaling challenges of teams and technologies, and also hone in on the importance of being relentlessly customer focused.

What is your top tip for someone moving into a technical leadership role?

A motto that has stuck with me since my first job is “People first, products and profits will follow”. Ultimately, the team you build and grow is key for the success of a business. When looking to develop professionally, leveraging internal and external resources for finding mentors and peer networks is extremely helpful to enable you to accelerate your learning from others who have gone through the same journey as you. Personally, I lean on my mentors and peers and mentor others on various networks to pay it forward.

Do you have any learning resource recommendations for others in your field of work?

There is a lot of literature in the technical, business and leadership aspects of engineering. It is important to be able to absorb all of these different perspectives and figure out how to apply the key principles to the specific situations of a team, startup or business. Fundamentally, being well-rounded as an engineering leader is of vital importance and this should be reflected in the types of learning content that one selects.

With this in mind, there are two books which I point out to technical leaders: AMP It Up by Frank Slootman and Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose) by Daniel Pink.

What excites you about working for a high-growth startup?

I believe that leadership means being able to manage change. Within a startup, change is the only constant, which provides a challenge and an exciting learning opportunity for all new joiners. As startups grow, we cross various inflection points in alignment, communication, and culture. Being able to navigate these successfully will be a key ingredient to building enduring companies.Specifically around TRM, I’m delighted to take on this new opportunity, working on products that create a safer financial system for billions of people worldwide. It is an immense privilege to work alongside exceptional engineering professionals across software engineering, data engineering, machine learning, and graph analytics, while also being tasked with the exciting responsibility to expand TRM’s engineering team at this critical juncture