Velodyne Lidar Inc.

09/14/2021 | News release | Distributed by Public on 09/14/2021 09:27

Velodyne Lidar Leadership Spotlight: Partha Narasimhan

Partha Narasimhan, VP, India Engineering & Managing Director

Partha Narasimhan recently joined Velodyne as Vice President of Engineering and Managing Director of the India Design Center. Partha is leading our new design center in Bangalore, where he is responsible for building and directing a cross-functional engineering team.

The India Design Center works closely with our San Jose-based engineering team on research and development activities to build customer-focused solutions. The design center is extending to India Velodyne's great culture of inventiveness, teamwork, and fun in an environment where the future becomes a reality.

In addition to R&D, the India Design Center will foster customer and partner opportunities in India for lidar-based solutions in automotive, new mobility, and more.

Partha brings deep experience in building and scaling design teams across multiple engineering groups. He recently served as Senior Director of ASIC Engineering at OpenSilicon. Previously, Partha held senior leadership positions at Rambus and Cypress.

We had a chat with Partha to learn more about him and what's on the agenda for the India Design Center.

Q: Welcome to Velodyne! Please share with our readers why you were excited to join Velodyne?

We are on the cusp of Industry 4.0, a new phase in the industrial revolution, which is converging autonomous machines, advanced robotics, smart machines, big data, and IoT. Across all areas of smart machines - moving goods, moving people, smart cities, intelligent infrastructure, and security - there is tremendous innovation. Every aspect of these innovation areas is critical to how we imagine and realize the future.

Velodyne Lidar is fabulously positioned to rapidly transform all these areas and play an important role in people's lives by advancing safety and security. Velodyne is in the business of creating smart technology for a world in motion and making our world a safer place.

We are at the threshold of this revolution, at the intersection of science (autonomy) and purpose (safety). Thus, it was a no-brainer for me to join Velodyne in this exciting journey to begin and lead the design center in India. It is exciting to have been given the opportunity to build the design center ground up. Together, we are building the future and the fascinating part is the future is now.

Q: Can you discuss the engineering and automotive ecosystem in Bangalore and why the city is an excellent location for our center?

Bangalore is blessed with all facets of engineering and an incredibly rich and diverse automotive ecosystem. First and foremost, there is very good engineering talent coming out of top-of-the-line prestigious universities.

Secondly, Bangalore has a unique blend of OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and Tier-1s across the automotive space. Additionally, there is deep expertise in software, semiconductors, and sensor-based modalities.

All of this leads to a rich ecosystem of engineering domains such as embedded software, firmware, electrical, field-programmable gate array (FPGA), hardware, functional safety, cryptography, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), mechanical, and many other areas.

Finally, there is a wide range of opportunities in the manufacturing ecosystem that can be leveraged to make cost-effective high-quality products.

Q: What are the plans for getting the India Design Center up and running - and making it a great place to work?

In my view, making the India Design Center a great place to work is about creating a culture of trust, care, and excellence. We care to listen to our employees, for they are our first customers. We will develop not just a culture of excellence and innovation but also a culture of 'forget the mistake, remember the lesson.' Innovation and excellence come from passion, purpose and the propensity to allow missteps and of course, doing something incredibly challenging and having lots of fun along the way.

In the last few months, we have accomplished all the preparatory work towards getting the Design Center setup all figured out, leading to our office warming which was done last month. We are in central Bangalore ('downtown') @ WeWork, Galaxy. We are actively hiring across a variety of roles and continue to look for exceptional talent across several diverse areas. More than IQ, we look for EQ: the empathy in putting yourself first before the team towards everyone's success.

India Design Center

For candidates reading this, if you are curious, have a desire to understand everything, have unlimited capacity to absorb knowledge, and want to build things and make them work, this is the right place to be. Do send your resumes to [email protected].

Q: To grow the center's engineering team, what skills are we recruiting for now?

We are razor-focused or should I say, laser-focused on growing our engineering talent team across many areas of lidar product development: hardware, FPGA, embedded software, board design, systems engineering, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC).

Other areas we hope to leverage (which are rich in talent space here) are perception software, robotics, functional safety and cyber security to name a few. Soon, we plan to engage with universities to proliferate adoption and engage in meaningful industry-university programs to foster R&D on many next-generation technologies.

We are also starting sales and field application engineer (FAE) operations to tap into this rich ecosystem.

Velodyne Lidar's Product Development

Q: Please share a little about your life outside the work world.

Work-life balance is key to recharge our batteries and be the best version of ourselves, every day. My 10-year-old son keeps me physically busy and intellectually challenged. He loves playing the keyboard, chess and enjoys reading about space, science, and everything in between.

Enjoying outdoor activities

I love going on long bike rides, playing badminton, and working out. Recently, I have developed a liking for yoga and meditation. As a family, we enjoy going on short day hikes around some beautiful hills that surround Bangalore.