Head of Technology, EVP and MD India at AirFi Aero

Twenty-four years building things nobody can come and fix.

I run technology at AirFi Aero. We put connectivity, retail and entertainment inside aircraft cabins, and they have to keep working over an ocean with no engineer aboard and no way to roll anything back.

Available for CTO and Head of Technology roles

Email meLinkedIn
Bangalore, India / 12.97°N 77.59°EAirFi Aero

2002 to now

Ground to orbit, one layer at a time.

I have spent the whole climb inside the stack, starting where the code touches the metal and ending where it has to reach a satellite.

  1. 2002PPP stackFirst job. Networking code for embedded hardware.
  2. 2003SeoulRebuilt an HTML engine to handle nested tables, on site at LG.
  3. 2005Ten-plus handsetsOwned the OS layer at Motorola. P2K onto Qualcomm and TI silicon.
  4. 2012US 9,229,517Delivery ownership at Intel, and a patent on pen power draw.
  5. 2015Co-founderBuilt a retail point-of-sale platform and the team around it.
  6. 2016Into the cabinJoined AirFi. Thirty-plus airlines now fly the stack.
  7. 2026Low Earth orbitA LEO satellite link on civil aviation flights. An industry first.
30+
airlines flying itKLM, Etihad, easyJet
50+
countries, liveSupport that does not sleep
20x
transaction growthAbsorbed over five years
1
US patent9,229,517, filed at Intel

Profile

I came up through the bottom of the stack.

I started at the very bottom, writing a PPP networking stack for embedded hardware, and spent the next decade inside phones: porting operating systems onto Qualcomm and TI silicon, then shipping ten-plus Motorola devices through the years Android was being invented around us. At Intel I owned software delivery across a whole system and filed a US patent for a way to stop a docked stylus draining a device.

Since 2016 I have been running engineering at AirFi, reporting to the CEO. I built the India site from nothing: leads, architects, PMs, hired fast and kept, with attrition close to zero. I own product strategy, architecture and release schedules across three verticals, a factory in Rotterdam, and live operations in more than fifty countries with support that does not sleep.

Hire fast, keep people
Standing up teams across geographies at speed, then holding onto them.
Simplify the architecture
Fewer moving parts survive longer in places you cannot reach.
Own it end to end
Ideation through deployment through 24x7 support, one owner.

Education

  • MBA, 2002

    Finance and marketing

    Nagpur University

  • BE, 1999

    Production engineering

    Nagpur University

Log

Every leg, in order.

  1. 2016AirFi AeroHead of Technology, EVP, MD IndiaNov 2016 to present / Bangalore

    Everything technical, reporting to the CEO: connectivity, retail and entertainment in the cabin.

    • Own product strategy, architecture and release schedules across satellite connectivity, cabin retail and in-flight entertainment.
    • Flew the first LEO Iridium satellite link on civil aviation flights, anywhere.
    • Signed 30+ global airlines including KLM, Etihad and easyJet.
    • Run factory operations in Rotterdam and live operations in 50+ countries with 24x7 support.
    • Built the engineering site from nothing across geographies, with attrition close to zero.
    • Restructured costs through 2020, when the fleet stopped flying, and kept the company ready to scale on recovery.
    • Took onboard retail onto SNCF's TGV, so the platform now sells at 300 km/h on rails as well.
    • Satellite
    • Cabin retail
    • IFE
    • Org building
  2. 2015RetailWorksHead of Technology, Co-founderJul 2015 to Oct 2016 / Bangalore

    Co-founded a retail point-of-sale platform and owned the build.

    • Built an Android point-of-sale application and its backend dashboard from scratch.
    • Set the architectural roadmap for the company.
    • Ran the engineering team, in-house and outsourced.
    • Android
    • Zero to one
  3. 2012Intel TechnologiesDelivery Owner, SoftwareOct 2012 to Jul 2015 / Bangalore

    Owned software delivery across every component of the system, across teams, vendors and contractors.

    • Coordinated delivery for all system software across cross-functional teams.
    • Filed US Patent 9,229,517, granted 2016, for powering down a device's digitizer panel while its pen is docked.
    • US patent
    • Delivery
  4. 2005Motorola MobilitySenior Staff EngineerApr 2005 to Aug 2012 / Bangalore

    Seven years in the OS layer, through the handset era and into Android.

    • Owned the OS layer, porting the P2K stack onto Qualcomm and Texas Instruments chipsets.
    • Core member of the team running end-to-end lifecycles for ten-plus Motorola devices.
    • Carried deep embedded work into the new Android platform while it was still settling.
    • OS porting
    • Android
    • Embedded
  5. 2003LG ElectronicsSystem AnalystJun 2003 to Mar 2005 / Bangalore and Seoul

    Embedded web browsers, partly on site in South Korea.

    • Re-implemented the HTML rendering engine of Microsoft Mobile Explorer to support nested tables.
    • Contributed to the design of LG's in-house browser.
    • Rendering
    • Embedded web
  6. 2002AKCPSoftware EngineerOct 2002 to May 2003 / Bangalore

    First role, writing networking code for embedded products.

    • Built the PPP network stack for the company's embedded product line.
    • C
    • Networking

Industry first

We put a LEO satellite link on a passenger aircraft.

Civil aviation had never flown a low Earth orbit Iridium link before. Cabins over open water went dark, and everyone had accepted that as the shape of the problem.

We shipped it. The ocean stopped being a gap in the map, and the cabin stayed connected through it.

Network
Iridium LEO constellation
Segment
Civil aviation
Status
First anywhere in the world

Contact

If it has to work somewhere hard to reach, I want to hear about it.

rohit@malaviya.infolinkedin.com/in/malaviya
Bangalore, India / 12.97°N 77.59°EHead of Technology, EVP and MD India at AirFi AeroPrivacyllms.txtllms-full.txt