Chetan Karnam

Engineering, delivery, and AI strategy leader with 20 years of experience running global engineering and quality organizations for high scale, live service digital products, and advising on AI adoption inside those organizations. Currently lead an 80+ person Delivery and Quality Engineering organization spanning the UK, Malaysia, and India, supporting enterprise publisher clients including Microsoft and Take-Two Interactive, with full ownership of P&L, OKRs, release governance, and cross geo team leadership. Early and consistent driver of responsible AI adoption inside engineering organizations: use case identification, ROI backed investment prioritization, model validation, bias detection, drift monitoring, and AI assisted automation built into production release pipelines well ahead of broad industry adoption.

Independently designed a full agentic AI architecture (router and planner agents, RAG grounded retrieval, function calling tool integration, risk tiered automation, human escalation, and evaluation loops) for a live service player support use case, building working fluency in the architectural patterns, governance considerations, and evaluation design used in modern agentic AI platforms. Comfortable operating at the intersection of AI strategy, engineering delivery, and regulated compliance, having led quality organizations inside state audited gaming and lottery technology and high compliance healthcare software, and having advised internal stakeholders on AI roadmap prioritization and risk tiered automation. Brings a blend of client facing delivery leadership, technical architecture literacy, and strategic AI advisory instincts to organizations building or scaling AI powered products, platforms, and transformation programs.

Head of Delivery & QA Engineering - Double Eleven Ltd - UK

(2021-02)

UK based co-development studio delivering engineering and QA services to enterprise publisher clients, including Microsoft and Take-Two Interactive, across large scale, live service digital entertainment platforms serving millions of concurrent users.

• Own full P&L, budget planning, and resourcing for an 80+ person global Delivery and Quality Engineering organization across the UK, Malaysia, and India, run much like a multi account services practice with concurrent client engagements and shared governance standards.
• Serve as the primary delivery governance and escalation point for enterprise publisher relationships, aligning QE and release strategy with each client's business goals and translating priorities into execution plans across parallel title engagements.
• Define and report on organization wide OKRs and KPIs, including defect escape rate, automation coverage, test cycle time, release predictability, and live incident response SLAs, to drive data driven investment and release decisions with client and internal executives.
• Evaluate emerging AI and automation opportunities across the delivery organization against ROI, feasibility, and risk criteria, prioritizing investment and presenting recommendations and roadmaps to client and internal executives.
• Introduced a responsible AI quality strategy for AI and ML driven features ahead of the broader industry curve: model validation pipelines, bias detection checks, real time production drift monitoring, and pre-release AI audit criteria.
• Architected and drove adoption of scalable test automation frameworks (Selenium, Appium, Python, C#) integrated with Jenkins and GitHub Actions CI/CD, reducing regression turnaround time and improving release predictability across concurrent engagements.
• Established release governance end to end: readiness reviews, Go/No-Go frameworks, environment sequencing from development through production, and rollback and hotfix protocols.
• Track DORA equivalent engineering metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery) to drive continuous improvement in engineering velocity and release confidence.
• Built technical mentorship programs and engineering excellence initiatives to grow quality capability and leadership bench strength across globally distributed teams.

Engineering Manager, QA / Head of QA - GSN Games India Pvt Ltd (a Scopely Company)

(2019-01 - 2021-02)

Global provider of cross platform social casino and skill-based gaming SaaS platforms with high frequency live content updates and international player bases.

• Built and scaled a Quality Engineering organization across geographically distributed teams, including QA leads, SDETs, automation engineers, LiveOps QA, and external vendor teams, establishing quality ownership across a high velocity SaaS delivery model.
• Established a risk-based release quality governance model integrating CI/CD, automated regression, branch validation, and production health observability, accelerating release readiness decisions and reducing late stage integration defects.
• Introduced quality telemetry dashboards and automated health monitoring pipelines to proactively surface system degradation, improving root cause analysis speed across distributed teams.
• Coordinated environment sequencing and release train planning across multiple concurrent product lines, and defined rollback and hotfix runbooks to protect the live player experience during high risk deployments.

QA Manager / Senior Lead Test Engineer - Scientific Games India Pvt Ltd

(2015-09 - 2019-01)

Global gaming and lottery technology provider operating under state gaming commission compliance and audit requirements, delivering enterprise quality solutions across 15+ concurrent client projects.

• Architected a common test automation framework across web, Windows, and mobile platforms (Selenium, Appium, C#/NUnit) integrated with Jenkins CI, reducing manual regression dependency across 15+ concurrent enterprise projects.
• Introduced code coverage metrics as a measurable CI quality gate, enforcing engineering quality standards across all client engagements.
• Defined NFRs, SLAs, and performance budgets as acceptance criteria with DevOps and project teams, directly informing performance and reliability engineering decisions in a compliance sensitive, regulated environment.
• Founded and owned LEAP (Lottery Engineering Apprentice Program), onboarding 24 graduates into engineering roles, a sustained investment in talent development and succession planning.
• Received multiple client accolades for consistently high quality delivery across 15+ enterprise projects; promoted twice within 3.5 years (Lead Engineer to Senior Lead to QA Manager).

Lead Automation Engineer - Verndale Software Development India Pvt Ltd

(2013-12 - 2015-09)

• Managed offshore teams and developed C# Selenium automation frameworks.

Verification Lead / Senior Test Engineer - Philips Healthcare / ABCO Advisory / Q-DAT / Inspire Consulting Services

(2006-06 - 2013-12)

• Built and led QA teams across healthcare and enterprise domains within a high compliance, regulated QMS environment.

M.Sc. - Computer Science - Sikkim Manipal University (2008)

B.Sc. - Electronics - Government Science College, Bangalore University (2006)