# Rohit Malaviya > Technology Executive. Head of Technology, EVP and MD India at AirFi Aero. Available for CTO and Head of Technology roles. Twenty-four years building things nobody can come and fix. - Location: Bangalore, India (12.97°N 77.59°E) - Email: rohit@malaviya.info - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malaviya - Website: https://rohit.malaviya.info ## Summary 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. ## Profile 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. ## How he works - 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. ## Career highlights - 30+ airlines flying it: KLM, Etihad, easyJet - 50+ countries, live: Support that does not sleep - 20x transaction growth: Absorbed over five years - 1 US patent: 9,229,517, filed at Intel ## 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 ## Trajectory - 2002: PPP stack. First job. Networking code for embedded hardware. - 2003: Seoul. Rebuilt an HTML engine to handle nested tables, on site at LG. - 2005: Ten-plus handsets. Owned the OS layer at Motorola. P2K onto Qualcomm and TI silicon. - 2012: US 9,229,517. Delivery ownership at Intel, and a patent on pen power draw. - 2015: Co-founder. Built a retail point-of-sale platform and the team around it. - 2016: Into the cabin. Joined AirFi. Thirty-plus airlines now fly the stack. - 2026: Low Earth orbit. A LEO satellite link on civil aviation flights. An industry first. ## Experience ### AirFi Aero: Head of Technology, EVP, MD India Nov 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. ### RetailWorks: Head of Technology, Co-founder Jul 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. ### Intel Technologies: Delivery Owner, Software Oct 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. ### Motorola Mobility: Senior Staff Engineer Apr 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. ### LG Electronics: System Analyst Jun 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. ### AKCP: Software Engineer Oct 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. ## Education - MBA, Finance and marketing, Nagpur University, 2002 - BE, Production engineering, Nagpur University, 1999 ## What he is looking for A CTO or Head of Technology role. He is most useful where the engineering is genuinely hard, the product has to survive somewhere it cannot be reached, and a team has to be built to do it.