Dale Vaz is the Head of Engineering at Swiggy, and focused on transforming the foodtech unicorn into an AI and ML-first company. Dale’s interest in computers started when he was in high school. His elder brother had just been given an MS-DOS x386 PC, and Dale was fascinated by computer games. He taught himself Basic and C programming languages with the hope of “writing my own software game”.
Previously the tech director for Amazon India consumer tech, payments engineering, and mobile engineering, Dale has over 18 years of software engineering experience, building tech platforms for organisations across three countries and six development centres.
View on technology
“Technology has always been a part of humankind, going back to ancient times when humans leveraged science to achieve herculean feats such as building Stonehenge or the Pyramids. Over the ages, technology has evolved, but more importantly, it has become accessible to the masses. Today, we use technology in every aspect of our daily lives. I believe that we are just starting to scratch the surface of how technology will change the world and how we live in it.”
Key tech focus
Working at Swiggy to build a strong tech stack to support all kinds of delivery
Looking to transform the platform into AI-first product.
Focus on expanding tech capabilities from software services to product engineering
Focus on bringing in strong internal skills in mobile development, large-scale distributed systems, big data, and AI
Role of AI and ML
Intelligent machines will perform complex tasks and elevate the quality of life.
As AI evolves and becomes more sophisticated, machine intelligence will provide unparalleled convenience and better quality of life.
Automated drones will start delivering critical supplies.
Robotic arms will perform complex life-threatening surgeries
Assisted living through humanoids.
AI will redefine traditional industries into leaner, more efficient corporations that are networked and interconnected with the larger ecosystem across boundaries of geography and language.
Top challenges
Legacy infrastructure and technology: Adopting emerging technology is harder for organisations that have invested in existing legacy technology. Migrating to new technology is a challenge since it involves significant risk, time, and cost in replacing legacy software with its complexity of business rules, workflows, and encoded tribal knowledge.
Legacy organisation structures and roles: Technology can often change the way organisations work, making certain roles redundant while creating new ones. This will require re-skilling the workforce and investing in creating new structures and roles designed to leverage technology.
Limited tech talent to build and operate systems using emerging technology
