Neil Kumar

Neil Kumar is the current Chief Technology Officer at Karat. Neil has over fifteen years of experience in the technology industry, with a focus on software engineering, management consulting, and product engineering.

Neil Kumar began their career in software engineering, working for Sony from November 2004 to January 2006 as a consultant. Neil then went on to start their own company, Hojicha Labs, where they worked as a software engineering consultant and management consultant for three years. In December 2005, they joined Yelp as Vice President of Engineering. As VP of Engineering at Yelp, Neil led the product engineering, devops/site operations and IT - an organization of over 200 people. Neil was responsible for hiring, technical leadership and managed the budget for the organization.

The majority of their time in the later years was on the recruiting side. Neil built an in house recruiting team and implemented a very successful college/internship program. Neil also managed Yelp's systems and data centers. Neil scaled Yelp to handle over 50M+ monthly unique vistors and expanded Yelp's data center. In addition, they moved some operations to the cloud (AWS, Softlayer). Finally, Neil managed Yelp's internal IT team. The team handled laptops, phones, AV systems/video conferencing and other IT needs for over 1000 employees worldwide. In addition, Neil worked on other IT projects such as moving Yelp to Oracle Financials and data warehouse design/implementation projects.

Neil Kumar studied computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they earned a BS.

Neil Kumar reports to Mohit Bhende, CEO and Co-founder. and Werner Koepf - SVP, Engineering reports to Neil Kumar. Neil Kumar works with Rachael Granby - VP, Interview Delivery, Lily Thill - VP, People & Talent, and Jeffrey Spector - President & Co-founder.